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Review
What initially appears to be a charming slice-of-life about a six year-old girl helping her dad get ready for a dinner party turns into a old-school puzzlefest with an extraordinary mechanic that I'm embarrassed to admit I needed the in-game hints to even discover. For those that don't mind knowing ahead of time, the mechanic is (Spoiler - click to show) that your bedroom has a dollhouse which is a replica of the actual house, and putting items in and taking them out of their respective rooms changes their relative size in reality. For example (not in the game), if you were to put a toy sword in the dollhouse's kitchen, and then go to the actual kitchen, you'd find a regular sized sword.
The coding for this puzzlefest is damn impressive, as there are so many things you can do that aren't required that the game allows you to do, and even some potential alternate solutions to puzzles are at least acknowledged even if unsuccessful.
I badly wanted to give this five stars, but the more I played the game the more I found myself exhausted. Some of the puzzles enhance the charm of this universe and the way your family reacts (or doesn't react) to some of things you do is great. I actually adore the whole sequence with (Spoiler - click to show) the stegosaurus and the way Dad reacts to it. But there are also several puzzles that seem to be there simply for puzzle's sake, (for example the (Spoiler - click to show)rope/anchor puzzle inside the impossible bottle), and I found myself going to the hints quite often just to get a jumpstart on what to do next. There are also so many items you can carry or manipulate and a lot of them are irrelevant to progressing in the game, so I found myself easily getting overwhelmed and resorting to the hints for that reason as well. For their own sake, the progressive hints were really well done and I rarely needed the final hint to progress; I mainly just needed a nudge on where to focus my efforts.
A must play for puzzle enthusiasts and I would be surprised if The Impossible Bottle doesn't win an XYZZY award or three.
