"God made the roller and bomber monsters; all else is the work of man." - Leobean Leguckner, Bean Studies Ph.D

Close to my favorite puzzle game, at the cost of feeling like my gray matter was beaten to a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pulp. I have rarely felt despair like I have trying to beat Bean and Nothingness endgame; the sensation was not unlike experiencing my brain turn into a gaping void into which no amount of screams would ever yield an echo. Being stuck on a Bean puzzle is a merciless experience that transforms one into a helpless babe where there is nothing in the world to rely on except oneself. All of this is to say that the reviews do not overestimate the difficulty; your balls WILL be crushed.

The one thing I want to emphasize in the conversation is that the gameplay transforms over time into something nearly unrecognizable at the end; as the mechanics complexify it's like going from addition, to multiplication, to calculus. That's all well and good, but it may be that you really enjoy addition but find calculus highly unfun - be warned that you need to be both EXTREMELY good at puzzle games and ready to adapt to changing gameplay if you want to see the ending to this game. It will be a rare fellow who cruises through and enjoys all of it, though such a fellow is probably a math major.

Absolutely incredible how cleanly the difficulty ramps in this. You never realized that you reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench of challenge until you're suddenly stuck on a puzzle for 2 hours, prodding it for anything you haven't thought of yet. Each island kicks off with absolute layups, then successively builds on the challenge while also forcing you to discover the interactions of the beans yourself. It never feels like some piece of knowledge is just missing, only that you're too stupid to have figured it out yet but in the best way possible. Also watching the playbacks of completing these in a minimal amount of steps is very satisfying.

An excellent underrated puzzle game that focuses on elegant, linchpin puzzles. The puzzles get pretty challenging but the difficulty curve is very approachable and progressing through the game does not require beating every single puzzle. The game mechanics are pretty simple but very creative and allow for a lot of interesting interactions, and the atmosphere of the game is oddly relaxing for a puzzle game.

I've reached the main ending after about 20 hours but still have to clear several dozen harder levels, and there is a level editor after that, so there's plenty of content too!