Gear：治愈齿轮 Reviews

Levels quickly become difficult, hard to parse, and timing-based in an irritatingly finicky way. It's a puzzle game where you might not be able to complete a level even after watching a level walkthrough. That's dumb design.

Gear is a perfectly fine, little game that really is more of a neutral recommendation more than a big thumbs up, but factoring the price into things I see no problem suggesting it to someone that likes puzzle games (with a bit of reaction/timing based gameplay mixed in). Premise is simple with the only action being that you click on specific gears to start them rotating to get rods to move through to their destinations without colliding. Of the 60 levels I'd say around only 20 really required timing specific presses while the rest was more just about order of operations. It follows the fairly typical formula that levels go easier to harder and then introduce a new mechanic and restart easy to hard, and repeat. But that said the last ten levels feel like they're meant to somewhat be a culmination of everything but due to their "gimmick" I thought it was more of a frustrating way to end things, but ultimately I still enjoyed sorting out the solution to each of the levels. There are quite a few puzzle games with different mechanics but are in the same market of very cheap, single-screen spatial awareness puzzles. This wouldn't be my top pick, but it's also not bad. Pick it up if you've already played others and want another. Lastly, it obviously depends on the player but I really question the 5-10 hour playtime as suggested. It took me exactly 90 minutes to play through all 60 levels. I likely am on the faster side, but I also can't fathom it taking the majority to five hours or more.

For a dollar I did expect a barebones game like no main menu or level select or audio options, and I like the cheap minimalist puzzle games, but Gear relies way too much on timing rather than puzzle solving. I thought this would just be a Hook knockoff since the description says minimalist puzzle game but level 13 and some of the later levels were so heavily reliant on timing that I had to set up a macro to adjust the intervals since I was so tired of all the trial and error. This game would have been exactly what I wanted if there was just a little wiggle room on those tight levels and not the bars' hitboxes extending past their visual indicators when they could have just very satisfyingly slid past each other.