SrRd_RacinG posted...
Cross Code is a good game but damn those puzzles can get very tricky toward the second half. At one point I was resenting the sheer number of puzzles.
More than just tricky puzzles, a lot of them weren't necessarily the best designed. The fun of solving puzzles in games mostly lies in coming up with the solution, not so much executing it, so a well-designed puzzle game aims to minimize the amount of time between "I've solved this in theory" and "I've solved this in practice and the game has rewarded me" (or if it does have to be longer, do something to fill that time with something that's gratifying enough to tide the player over). In quite a few cases in Crosscode, I found that I knew how to solve a given puzzle, but I still had to try multiple times to execute that solution because I was slightly too slow or got the angle of a shot slightly wrong, which definitely got frustrating because at that point the puzzle stopped being fun to solve. I liked the puzzle design in general and found most of them fun to solve, but the mechanical execution definitely fell a bit short on occasion because they were just tuned a little too tightly.
Of course, saying this, there was an option to adjust the speed of balls in puzzles to make them easier, so I should probably have swallowed my pride and taken advantage of that to make the game more fun. But that involves swallowing my pride, and why would I do that when I could just blame somebody else for the problems I had?