One of the things I truly love about indie games is their tendency to combine multiple elements of different genres into one experience, with the hope to make something new and better than what you’ve seen before while still feeling familiar. Of course, walking the line between inventive and simply frustrating can be tricky as well, since not all styles of play necessarily cooperate well with one another. In the case of Planetiles it ends up being part puzzler, part strategy game, and a bit of an environmental sim as well, at least in terms of the presentation.

How it works is that you’ll start out with an empty board, with your task being to place pieces of all sorts of shapes and sizes that then have blocks that represent different environments on them. The first part of your goals is to simply be able to keep going, working to fill every space the best you can. On the high level this is done by being effective in your planning, trying to keep pieces of the same types together, especially if you’re able to get them to combine into larger areas like a 3 x 3 block, which then will create what’s basically an evolved version of those blocks, providing you with bonuses you’ll want and need.

The challenge here, though, is really that the in-game tutorial and instructions don’t do a great job of helping you understand the game’s full ruleset or even the meta-game elements that you’ll need to be in command of for greater success. You do get a rundown of fundamentals, but it’s a bit threadbare, so you’ll likely spend quite a number of runs simply stumbling through, earnestly trying to do your best, but not fully grasping what it is you really need to do to be effective. A big chunk of your success is tied to keeping an eye on your current objectives that are present on the right side of the screen, but that you’ll need to fully reveal to read and understand. Then throw in the fact that in terms of colors I sometimes had a hard time differentiating some of the tile types and I’d mistakenly make bad placements, also contributing to some aggravation.

In the end, there’s absolutely a unique and well-constructed idea here, I just wish the game were more effective at getting the player up to speed. I understand that sometimes the goal is to have people organically come to understand how things work, but perhaps making an optional advanced tutorial could be an option to leave it to the player to decide. It just felt like I burned time flailing around with only a partial understanding of what I was doing for too long, and I could see where some players will simply decide to go play something else and relegate this to the backlog “to play later”. There’s something interesting to uncover here, but you may want to supplement your understanding with some online help to avoid needless initial confusion.