Magnetic Daydream Reviews

Good, difficult puzzles

This is a collection of good hard puzzles. Hard in that you really need to think outside the box (good), and occasionally hard due to slightly janky physics (not so good - you get used to it, but also still brings many frustrating moments). I'm about half way through the game's 60 levels in about 10 hours. So there's plenty of content and head-scratching. The levels are generally pretty short if you know what you're doing. You will spend far more time experimenting and thinking compared to being able to play the whole level once you know the solution. Getting the solution is genuinely satisfying. For a game with "Magnetic" in the title and half of your view taken up by a giant on-screen magnet (annoying but you sorta get used to it), there have been very view magnetic related puzzles. Most of the puzzles rely more on a portal mechanism similar to what's in the game Portal. However, there are couple of twists (no pun intended) to the portals in this game. First, the portals are not two-way: in other words one is only for entering and the other is only for exiting. Second, portals are placed in free space (not on walls like in "Portal"), and you can enter the portal from either side, which will bring you out on the respective side of the exit portal. Third, when facing the entrance portal (and you can see the view out of the exit portal), you can rotate the orientation of the exit portal in 90 degree increments, but gravity will still be pointing towards the bottom of the screen, irrespective of the rotation you made, once you exit the portal. In other words you are given a mechanism to shift the orientation of the game world with respect to gravity. This gravity shifting mechanic plays a big part in the puzzle solutions. The game autosaves after each level. I once tried the manual save, quit, restart, and manual load mechanism, and it did not go well - the game crashed. It's possible something else was wrong with my system at the time. However, as I said before, the levels are short, so just relying on the between-level autosave and then "continue" where firing up the game works well enough. There are not a whole lot of quality of life features. Options are just screen resolution and sound levels. There is no invert mouse vertical. The scenery and music are nice and chill. Overall this is a really good first person puzzle platforming game with some novel mechanics. It's an amazing value for the price.