I found it to be a beautifully frustrating experience. There clearly are a ton of layers and puzzles can help you solve other puzzles. I appreciate the effort it took to make it, but it doesn’t feel like it respects the effort it takes to play it. Here’s some of my frustrations:

• At a certain point you should get a magic vacuum upgrade to pick up all common items in rooms. Hunting for gems and coins in rooms on my 25th day sucks and adds nothing
• I should be able to move at least three times faster. Fuck, navigating the house is slow
• It really sucks that the first time you “solve” the primary puzzle you actually can’t progress until you solve a separate other puzzle that is dependent on finding one room and then another, and that is not clearly indicated at all
• While footsteps eventually become trivial it’s an annoying resource when you don’t have full control over the layout of the house. So you can build a maze through no fault of your own and then you don’t get the steps to explore them
• Eventually there’s a special room you can pick every run. Why do you make me actually traverse to that room? It burns useless steps and again, is slow as fuck
• Additionally, the only “permanent” room you can place (to my knowledge) you can get way too early. So if you put that in a crappy spot you just kinda fuck yourself for the rest of the game
• Sometimes you will think you have solved a puzzle but need to assemble the rooms to implement the solution. So you can: spam runs and rooms to get lucky and find it, do normal runs and just hope you find it, try to manipulate RNG to maximize the chance of solving that puzzle. None of those are fun when you have a couple of solutions to try and you spend multiple in game days manufacturing that opportunity
• The items are kind of crazy. There is a puzzle that requires you to assemble three items in a specific room, then discover a separate other room, then get to that room to use that item. There’s like 15+ items in the game, how are you ever supposed to organically put that together? Also finding a metal detector in my first 5 days made me paranoid that every room was hiding keys and coins on the floor even when I didn’t have it
• Some of the puzzles are so obtuse and have so many layers that if you ever happen to solve one that you suddenly think all puzzles could be that crazy. I solved the chess puzzle before the periodic table puzzle and was building this wildly complicated solution to that puzzle when it was actually really simpke

Despite my gripes I do think it’s a good game with incredible puzzles and a very unique design. I just think it doesn’t account for people actually playing it. I would bet there’s a really intriguing story under this but eventually I got so hung up on performing solutions I had already discovered I couldn’t be bothered to also discover the plot. I did read a summary after that helped contextualize things. Honestly what I’m looking forward to is when someone else takes these mechanics and refines it into a really cool rogue-like