Gleaming the Verb by Kevin Jackson-Mead utterly escaped me.
The game is a series of word puzzles where you must suss out an answers from sentences the game provides. I’m bad with word jumbles, anagrams, and cryptograms. I can’t grasp how letters fit together into words. When I’m presented with something like this my brain locks up. Sure, I can try to brute force them, writing the words down and manipulating the letters. But it never works out. I’m like a kid trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. I know what I’m supposed to do, but don’t know how to do it.
I could not solve even the first puzzle of Gleaming the Verb without the walkthrough. From the answer I was able to see what the rule for the puzzle was. I couldn’t even do this from the second puzzle on. The game defeated me. I used the walkthough to complete it but with no compression of what I was going. I know that there’s something going on here, but I can’t figure it out. As such I won’t be rating the game.
Games Journal 