It’s hard to overstate how much fun it can be to reach the top of a mountain in Pine and plan your next destination based on which areas look unfamiliar. The map fills out large sections at once rather than slowly filling in only the areas you explore, so this is often helpful to figure out which parts of each area you haven’t visited yet. Finding new areas is always a joy because they inevitably have new crafting materials and villages (which often require bribing the faction inside so that you can trade with them and not be attacked on sight). When Pine embraces its strength and allows you to befriend or antagonize factions by crafting items to impact their economies and villagers, there’s a lot of fun to be had. When it decides to disregard all of that in favor of trying to replicate The Legend of Zelda‘s puzzle-based dungeons, however, things take an ugly turn.

The problem is that Zelda‘s dungeons are designed in a way that naturally guides you around and makes it obvious what your goal is. The difficulty usually arises from the execution, and you’re never lost for long in any of those games.

Pine‘s idea of a puzzle, on the other hand, is giving you a vague diagram or symbol and forcing you to guess what it means. Most of the time, brute-forcing puzzles (or, where possible, using a movement-boosting item to simply skip them) is faster than figuring out how symbols correlate to the area you’re in because of their vagueness. You rarely feel a sense of triumph after overcoming Pine‘s puzzles. Between the vague symbols, some hidden puzzle elements that you can only see from certain angles, and item abilities that can be insufferably buggy, Pine‘s puzzles are some of the worst I’ve encountered.

Right now I’ve played Pine for 13 and a half hours, and I’d estimate that around 3 of those hours were spent trying to figure out awkward puzzles that don’t make much sense. I don’t understand why it insists on including so many puzzles when building up allied villages and sabotaging those of factions you don’t like is so entertaining, but the deeper I play, the more Pine shoves its strengths to the side to emphasize its weaknesses (platforming, puzzles, and combat) instead. Case in point, each dungeon seems to make it harder to maintain positive faction relationships, ensuring that more NPCs attack you on sight. You’re not only having your time wasted with unclear puzzles, but you’re also coming out to a world less easily influenced and fun afterward. Just… why?