Dolphins-cyborgs and open space

I want to like this one. Truly. A solo developer, a fever-dream title, a premise that asks absolutely nothing of realism - cyborg dolphins launching a spacecraft is exactly the kind of unhinged hook that gets me to click install on a slow afternoon. And for a short window, the core loop does something quietly satisfying: you are given a target figure made of blue lines on an upper panel, and your job is to reproduce that figure in a workspace below by dragging cubes around until rubber-like threads snap into the correct shape without crossing each other. It is a graph-untangling puzzle, essentially, and that genre has a calm, almost meditative pull when it works. The problem is that ninety levels of the same untangling mechanic, with no meaningful evolution of tools or interactions between elements, runs dry well before the halfway point. The user reception sitting around 2.5 out of 5 across two dozen reviews tells its own story - not a disaster, but a game that outstays its welcome. The difficulty curve is uneven rather than graduated. Some levels feel trivially easy; others introduce configurations that require patience the experience has not earned. There is no timer, no move counter, no secondary objective to layer strategy onto the spatial thinking. You drag, you check, you move on. That loop needs something else to sustain it across a full session, and that something else never arrives. There is also a practical issue worth flagging: the achievements are documented as broken by the community, with a Steam guide dedicated to fixing all nine of them. For a casual puzzle game where achievements are one of the few trackable goals, that is a real quality-of-life gap. The developer has not addressed it publicly, and the game has been dormant since its 2017 release. No updates, no community activity beyond that single bug thread. Who is this actually for? Honestly, it might scratch an itch if you are the kind of person who finds graph-untangling genuinely soothing and you are not asking for narrative, atmosphere, or mechanical depth. The premise suggests whimsy but does not deliver on it visually or sonically in any way I can confirm - the dolphin-in-space flavour is purely in the title and the setup text, not woven into the experience. If you find the genre idea interesting, something like Untangle or any of the browser-era graph puzzle games will give you the same loop with less friction. Solo developers deserve patience, and I will always give credit for shipping something complete. Ninety levels is a real quantity of content. But completion is not the same as craft, and this one needed either a stronger visual identity, a richer mechanical vocabulary, or at minimum working achievements to justify attention in a Steam catalogue full of sharper puzzle offerings.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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