TOHU 4+

Cute but annoying

(Edit to add: player! Save your game at the end of chapters! Otherwise the only option is to replay from the very start)

I really want to love this game! I’m about two chapters in, and It’s going to take me hours to finish, not much of the time so far has been playing the actual game, but because I’m spending so long figuring out how to DO the thing I’ve solved. It’s sooo frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, the puzzles are the right kind of hard, it’s the mechanics of the game that are grinding my gears. Most things, the characters have to do, but every now and then, there’s a piece that i have to manipulate, and no clue for the change. I spent way too long trying to open the petals for the copter, or to pump the pump for electricity. I KNEW what needed to be done, I just couldn’t make the characters do it, no matter what I tried. Having pretty much only three character responses doesn’t help - yay, nope and NO would be well supplemented with a “not yet” and a “you do it”. I spent ages trying to manipulate a puzzle I’d solved, but simply didn’t fall into that part of the story line (the singing stones, for example. I figured it out as soon as I saw the clue, but it wouldn’t answer until quite a bit later.) Annnnd, the specificity of the reaction zones is frustrating. (I still don’t know what opened the catapult mechanism.) Putting an egg into the bowl instead of the waiting hand is counterintuitive - why not both/either. It makes no difference to the puzzle when you’ve already found the thing and the character it goes to, but not being able to give it to them, coupled with many screens of “am I doing this?” “Am I doing this right?” “Am I doing this now?” Again, as soon as I saw the catapault, I knew it was a balance scale, and when it didn’t seem to open with either the girl or the bot, spent a lot of time looking for things to pick up and balance on its hands. There are a LOT of possible things to pick up on those three screens. It’s annoying that I can’t turn off the repetitive music without losing the ambient sounds, too. Especially since it’s not a cheap game, it should be more enjoyable than this!