I have been misled by games before, but this game is probably the most misleading piece of slop I have ever had the displeasure to play. I honestly have no idea how is this game positively reviewed, other than maybe people don't play past the first few set of puzzles.

First, I'll talk about the interface. The UI of this game is absolutely atrocious. For a game that uses so many UI elements and panels, there doesn't seem to be any effort put into them. A lot of times, I have no idea what the icons mean, where certain buttons are, or that the popups are popups. There is times where there's no transition; panels appear and disappear abruptly which is absolutely jarring at best and confusing at worst. And the colors. I get that they want to do flat colros but they just clash so much.

The game also explains things really badly when they introduce new mechanisms. Couple that with the way they do their UI makes it incredibly bad. Once you figured stuff out, things become fine again but holy shit, you know things are bad when you go to the steam forums and see players and the developers discussing at length about what they don't understand for certain puzzles. It's bad. There are a few puzzles where I had to find videos of solutions not because I don't know how to do them, but because I just don't understand what I'm supposed to do!

I do think it's novel that for some puzzles they actually used ML algorithms so that we can experience what it's like to be an AI developer. For those puzzles though, I don't think people enjoy tweaking parameters and hoping for the best to clear a puzzle (in other words, clearing a puzzle because of some level of RNG), especially when there is no feedback on whether they are progressing or not.

The progression is terrible, from both education and gaming point of view. At the end of the day, whole game is about connecting nodes and getting shapes with colors from one place to another, but I don't know if the developers understand that. I understand that the nodes that filter the shapes and colors, and nodes that have a percentage to fail; those are fine. Then there are nodes that...don't seem to do anything interesting or new, exist for a couple of puzzles (sometimes you are forced to use them otherwise, for whatever reason, your previous methods won't work because there's apparently some secret variable just for these puzzles), and then you never see those nodes ever again. Like wtf? Like the whole "RNN" levels are hot garbage.

Oh and I hate the upgrade system. Like why does a puzzle game have a upgrade system to make the puzzles slightly easier by lazily reducing the requirements? What's the point?? Expectedly you have people in the forums giving solutions for others without upgrades and then the focus of the conversation usually degenerates into "just buy upgrades" instead of really trying to solve the problem.

ALSO, the fun puzzles really are the non-Machine Learning related ones. In fact, it feels like 50% of the puzzles in this game is not even ML related!! What a scam.

2/10. Has some novel ideas, non-ML puzzles are decent, but ultimately trash. I can't believe so many people worked on it.