Puzzle games are, more often than not these days, based on either programming logic or engineering logic. There is an obvious throughline with this sort of intention, games being built by programmers through programming, which itself requires some sort of engineering knowledge (as far as "how components work with one another" goes). Engineering and programming is, essentially, applied puzzles, so it makes sense to take inspiration from them, especially when you are already familiar.
But this sort of thing starts to wear on you after awhile, especially when most puzzle games seem to focus more on your learning the rules than challenging what those rules can do. Take Hook, for example. Hook is a simple puzzle game whose real challenge comes in disorientation. Hook, for all intents and purposes, is pick-up-sticks with a complication. The idea is to get all of the sticks (some overlapping one another, some hook-shaped as the name implies) off the board. The sticks don't get pulled up through the Z-axis, as you would do in a physical game of pick-up-sticks, but rather must pulled from their point to their hilt (a small line like the head of a nail indicates the bottom of a stick). If anything gets in its way when pulling it to the hilt, you will lose a life (indicated with one to three dots on the left hand side). Hook is, firstly, challenging the order in which you pull the sticks. Finding this order is easy enough. Simply look for the sticks with nothing in its path to prevent it from being pulled. The second is where things get more complicated, and more in line with engineering.
Hook looks like an engineering diagram, the kind you generally see for electronics. Big gray buttons feed into thin lines that snake over one another like copper inlays on a motherboard. Pushing a gray button follows the line to the corresponding stick, and will attempt to pull it. Making sure these lines don't lead to sticks that cannot be pulled is your general challenge. There is a set of rules to how these lines work. Lines can cross but generally speaking the "current" from the button to the stick will only travel in one direction. If, instead, the current were to split into multiple directions, the cross over the lines will have a dot on it, indicating the current will be split along all paths connected to the dot. Parts of the path will have a circle around it, meaning you can rotate the lined portion within to change the track in which the signal will travel. Essentially, what you are doing is switch tracks to a railroad, making sure all destinations are valid stations. The underlying logic is easy top pick up, but the complex way the lines layer over one another and connect to the varying sticks makes this difficult to parse. Making things more difficult is the pretty patters the lines, sticks, and buttons often make. The puzzle itself isn't particularly hard - I managed to beat all 50 levels in something close to a half hour - but there is a distracting element meant to overwhelm you with information even as your choices are rather minimal. The closest you could get to something like a sincere challenge is in trying to clear as many sticks in as few moves as possible, but that is completely external as the game itself never recognizes the effort. There is nothing wrong with this sort of thing, it just isn't particularly interesting.
I've sounded overly critical of Hook, but I had fun with the game. It is a simple game that was obviously made for phones and tablets, but translates just fine to PC. It provides enough distraction and fun to keep you entertained briefly, but has little else really to offer. It isn't particularly puzzling, it is more just patience testing. Hook is fine. It is what it is, and though I enjoyed the aesthetic, I wish that there had been something more mechanically complex about the gameplay.
6.0
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