Rusty Lake: Roots

As a point n click puzzle solving game, Rusty Lake: Roots has three main gameplay problems.

1) There are objects you click on to interact with, things that you click and hold to drag around, and other stuff that you click and it gets added to your inventory for use on another screen.
How are they differentiated?
The problem is, they aren't. And it is frustrating to be expected to solve a puzzle without being given this info. Far too often you'll think "how was I supposed to know I can drag that?"
An egregious example is a chessboard with a black knight. You don't click it to add it to your inventory. It appeared to wobble when clicked. Clicking it and holding does not appear to drag it around. Oh, but it does move to where you dragged your empty cursor when you let go. While holding the button there's no indication you're doing anything, and if you let go on a square it can't move to you also get no feedback. Which brings me to my next point.

2) Your inventory space does not get utilized for hints.
There's plenty of puzzles where you have to match weird symbols with other objects or locations, and so even when you know how the hint fits into the puzzle box that you can arrive at the solution, it is tedious to go back and forth between the location of the hint and the location of the puzzle box. Take your own notes with pen and paper or grab screencaps.

3) Some puzzles are just bad and/or don't work right.
Very early in the game, Summer 1870 - The Staircase, the door to the staircase opened for me before I put all the triangles into the cipher.
One alchemy puzzle gave me the victory lens flare before I'd gotten the items from my intventory into the flask like they were supposed to be.
The expected order of events can make as little sense as removing a bullet from someone's arm in order to be allowed to fit a prosthetic leg of them.
In a puzzle where you have to paint by numbers, the game accepted my wrong inputs of color on other objects, but then refused to let me add the correct color to the ground until my errors were corrected.
And the final puzzle is outright the worst. It does not reuse a mechanic it already taught you though it looks like it, and instead it doesn't give the hint on how to solve the puzzle until you've already solved it!

The gameplay is clunky, and I can't believe I'm saying that about a point n click.
There's hardly any music anywhere either. Some short ambient vignettes looking at the family tree, but that's about it. It bores me and makes me less motivated to solve the puzzles I struggle with.
I care not at all for this mute family or their motivations for wanting to resurrect an ancestor.

What this game does well is set a particular gloomy late 1800's to early 1900's mood and let you choose the order in which you play some levels.