Familiar Problems

I playtested this game and have replayed the published version. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but here are my thoughts otherwise!

First, the game is just plain fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments, and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. (Spoiler - click to show)The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. (Spoiler - click to show)Soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.

The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.

Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!