English Country Tune

The game's title seems to have been chosen randomly, because it says nothing about the game. It's nothing to do with country music at all, instead, it is essentially a block-pushing puzzle game with an abstract visual style.

You control a blue, flat square that navigates over the cubic structures. Your square clings to the cubes, so can travel across any of the surfaces as long as it isn't blocked by an obstacle. The puzzle mechanics are varied depending on the world you select. Each mechanic usually eases you in, only thinking in one plane. When things get more advanced, then the structures are 3D.

At first, your objective is to guide ‘larva’ balls to an incubator (translucent cube goal). This is a block pushing puzzle, but the larva balls have strange behaviours in regards to gravity. Touching them not only pushes them forward a square, but if you push them over the edge, their gravity flips so they move at right-angles to your position.

In the 'Whale' levels, cubes have light beams extending from each side. These cubes can only be pushed by making contact with the beam. Your job is to push the whales off the level, but this gets complicated when there are many of them.

The next set of levels are 'Planting' stages. You leave behind green blocks, and your task is to cover every tile without retracing your steps. These tend to be the easiest stages but you do have to think, especially when you have to do it in 3D.

Later worlds even combine mechanics, so you will be utilising whales to push the larva to their incubators, then finding a way to push the whales off the level.

There's even more ideas to unlock such as the one where you are shearing bits off your panel to match a pattern. There's even a mode where you have to design stages, and then solve it.

There are no timers and no move limits. You can press R to restart, or Z to undo your last move. This means you can experiment, learning the levels and mechanics by trial-and-error.

The camera is following along as you go. You can press Shift to view the level, but it snaps back into position immediately. This can be frustrating when you make a plan, then find the view changes, leaving you disoriented.

Graphically, it looks quite bold and stylish. I found the backgrounds to be bizarre though. There's some weird flicker which either looks like small bugs crawling on your screen, or the eye condition where you see 'floaters'. I've no idea why the developer thought this was a cool visual effect. It's distracting and makes you feel paranoid and uneasy.

I found the levels to be quite inconsistent. Sometimes it's hard, other times it's easy, and not necessarily in a linear order. It can be devilishly tough, so should only be played by people that love the challenge. At first, I didn't find it interesting, but once you gain satisfaction from completing a few tricky puzzles, then it does captivate you. I found the varied levels to be great, but you need to fully complete a world to unlock the next couple of worlds, so if you get stuck, the rest of the game is unavailable to you. This would be a shame, as some of the best levels aren't until later, so an option to skip puzzles would have been greatly appreciated.

An abstract puzzle game for serious fans of abstract puzzle games: I have heard some people get stuck at the game menu, and the brutalist graphics style is not really inviting casual fans either.
For the rest of us, this is a delightful bag of goodies.