TumbleSeed Developer Admits The Game Is Probably Too Hard

According to its own description, TumbleSeed is a “deceptively deep roguelike”. But according to the developers, it’s just straight up too hard – so much so that the company ignored review requests for the game because they knew what reception TumbleSeed would get.

If you haven’t played TumbleSeed, it’s basically a puzzler with cute monster pals where you tilt a seesaw-esque thing to move across the screen. It’s funky and a bit weird, and you can see Heather play through the game below.

As you can see in the first twenty minutes of the game, TumbleSeed isn’t as simple as it first seems. And Greg Wohlwend, one of the designers on TumbleSeed (who also worked on Threes), explained that it’s been a problem – so much so that the studio has been ignoring review requests for the “last few weeks”.

Wohlwend intimated that “influential press and streamers” had stopped enjoyed TumbleSeed after reaching a certain point, primarily because of the game’s mechanics, or the challenges built around them.

It’s a little heartbreaking, partially because TumbleSeed does try to do something different. And for the most part, the reception hasn’t been especially savage. From the critic side of the equation, the game has a 79 aggregate score on MetaCritic. On Steam, the game has a 80% user rating – but it also only has 40 reviews, and the highest amount of concurrent players since launch is a measly 46.

It’s a rough spot for a developer to be in: you have total faith and belief in the quality of what you’ve built, but the world around you doesn’t seem to be giving the game the time needed to fully understand the machinations of what you’ve created. And in a world where there are thousands of games and little time to consume them all, it’s a hard sell.

It’s not yet finalised what exactly will happen to TumbleSeed, although the early indication is that either easier difficulties will be added, or modes will be implemented that introduce movement challenges later in the game.


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