I played Factory Balls by Bart Bonte, which is for really anyone of any age who wants to puzzle! I played the first 25 levels, which was a series of looking at the model ball, freaking out, and then working through it and seeing a solution and realizing that was easier than expected. There are two mechanics that I found annoying/nonsense but made me feel much closer to this game/feel like I’m getting smarter in the long term. Those are 1. the annoying limitation of needing to layer the hat/belt/etc and 2. The fact that what happens when watering the grass/flowers didn’t make real-world sense.
I’m clicking around at paints, trying to figure out if you have to do red → hat → blue or blue → hat → red. That’s the puzzle. If you put the wrong color first, you might mess up the whole ball, so you have to imagine the steps vividly in your head. That’s awesome, that’s awesome. But then, there’s this super annoying fact that the stencils must be layered in a particular order too. That is, it’s just a time suck. You’re not going to mess up your ball because of it, but it’s just an illogical game mechanic—and it brought me much closer to the game. I’d notice that, early on, my solve times were slow. Later on, it felt much faster. Maybe I’m getting a little more skilled, though I ultimately think your skill is fairly set in stone, but I began to believe that I was literally getting smarter from this game.
Something similar happened for the fact that overwatering a plant makes it look dried out (?) and overflowering flowers makes them disappear. Once my friend was racking his head for how to solve a puzzle, but didn’t know that for some reason, flower growth stages operated on a loop of 3, while grass was not looped. That super arbitrary rule made little sense to the game and honestly any new player, but the power of knowing that out of pure hours made me feel so awesome. It’s like I got to experience this thing that is living and growing and has its own problems, but it’s improving me.
While the game is very accessible to learn (it makes sense, you gotta paint something before using certain stencils, etc.), there’s a feeling that it takes a natural skill—I’m just “good” or “not good” at visualizing this logic. That sensation was flared up by the super twisted fact that the longer you play, you get more satisfaction as you get things that only you get—as in, you get things that you could only get playing this game. When my friends would pop in and try a puzzle, they’d remark at how difficult it is, and imply that I’m more naturally skilled than them. But I am not uniquely good at this at all—I’ve just played it for an hour now. Still though, I’d implicitly believe them. I would confound my increased technical skill and improved solve times with me getting smarter and better at visual thinking, not me increasingly remembering that the belt isn’t allowed to go over the hat. That’s a gatekeep-y feeling that makes me feel more like this game is mine. I sound horrible, but that’s the force that kept bringing me back to this game. TO CLARIFY: I DON’T THINK I’M A GENIUS. THAT’S THE POINT.
