Circularity

I want to like Circularity more than the evidence allows me to. Solo developer Giorgi Abelashvili put together something genuinely stripped-back and odd here: a minimalist puzzle game where your character moves in straight lines, bounces off walls, hops through portals, and has to land in a final exit portal to clear each stage. That core mechanic, the commitment to straight-line trajectory planning, is the kind of single-constraint idea that great small puzzlers are built on. You aim, you commit, the geometry either works or it doesn't. There is a satisfying spatial logic to it when it clicks. The level structure rewards clean runs. Finishing a stage with a higher star rating unlocks additional levels, which gives perfectionists a reason to replay earlier puzzles with tighter execution rather than just stumbling through. On paper that is good design economy, especially for a solo project. The game launched in October 2017 with a modest level count and the developer signaled more content was coming, pinning posts about additional chapters to the community forum as recently as 2023. The intention was clearly there. Here is where honesty requires me to pump the brakes. The Steam reception sits at roughly 66 percent positive across 51 reviews, which for a micro-budget casual puzzler is the community telling you something specific. Community posts describe certain later levels, particularly around stage 72, as outright broken, with missing puzzle elements that prevent completion and achievements that simply will not trigger. One player summary described it plainly as a lesson in patience through frustration and bugs. That is not a vibe issue, that is a structural one. When a puzzle game's later stages cannot be completed as intended, the relaxation the game promises curdles into something else entirely. The minimalist visual style is honest and clean, and I respect the restraint. There is no noise here, no bloated UI, no story padding things out. The soundscape is quiet enough that you can hear your own thinking, which suits the puzzle-box format well. But quietness and intentionality are different things, and the lack of post-launch polish suggests the former rather than the latter. The 80 Steam achievements are a notable number for this scope of game, clearly designed to give the completionist crowd a reason to stay, but achievement bugs compound the frustration for exactly that audience. If you are the kind of player who finds calm in geometric problems and can tolerate the roughness of a 2017 solo project that never quite got the maintenance it needed, there is a seed of something likeable here. For anyone else, the mixed reception and documented level-breaking bugs are fair warning that the puzzle loop runs out of both content and reliability before it outstays its welcome in a satisfying way.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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