Game Design Review: English Country Tune

English Country Tune is a puzzle game where you play as a square. To solve puzzles you must push balls into boxes. This game has a mix of action and puzzle which I find very entertaining to play. To get a better feeling of the game, you can watch the trailer below or even download the demo for either PC or Mac.

Pros:

• Puzzle select interface is very interesting. In each puzzle selection screen, you can see how many puzzles exist in that level. The puzzles that are available are displayed with a minimap of the puzzle with a color tint. The unsolved puzzles show in white while the solved ones in black.
• In the advanced larva stage, puzzles unlock more than one puzzle. Some players don’t like a linear game structure. Giving the players a choice on which puzzle they want to solve next can make him feel in control of the game’s overall experience.
• Using shift to control the camera view adds a bit of strategy to the game. Players can use this feature to plan their movements or familiarize themselves with the puzzle.
• Sometimes you can get accidentally move something just 1 square where you didn’t want to or want to test a solution. Pressing “z” to undo or “r” to restart a level is a very helpful feature to either fix a mistake or help the player quickly test solutions.
• The calm background music helps with the thinking.

Cons:

• Some of the levels can be confusing on what needs to be done.

What I Would Change:

• While the majority of the puzzles I was able to figure out what needed to be done without too many complications, some of them gave me a bit of trouble. On these, I usually just tried every possible combination of moviments until it was solved. The first few puzzles do have a hint button that the player can step on to pop up a hint. As the game goes on the puzzles start to get bigger. Adding a physical hint button for players to step on large levels would mean that the player would need to take a lot of time to review the hints. I’d add a keyboard button to display hints. This way, it doesn’t get on the way of every single puzzle.

What kind of puzzle games that you like do play? Comment about it below!