Indie developers have a particular problem when it comes to making their small puzzle game. In this day and age, a good puzzle game hardly works on its own without some sort of small gimmick. Usually, this works in a couple of ways. In the rarest way, you could have a puzzle game with unique and, perhaps, niche mechanics a la Zachtronics, or you could go the aesthetically pleasing or unique route of games like Hook and Little Inferno (if you can call that a puzzle game). Lastly, you can try to contextualize it in a meaningful or entertaining story. This worked best and most famously with Portal, but in the indie game scene the standout example would be Thomas Was Alone. Thomas Was Alone is technically a platformer, basic in premise and gameplay, with each of the characters just being a differently dimensioned rectangle. Thomas Was Alone featured a surprisingly heartwarming story about loneliness, friendship, and teamwork and may be the only time I can think of that putting a somewhat tangential story on top of a basic indie game has ever actually worked for me.
She Remembered Caterpillars wants to have a compelling story, and at least tries to pick a plot that would fit its puzzle mechanics. She Remembered Caterpillars is about grief, the loss of a parent and the reckoning afterwards, the kind of mechanical tumbling that fits a game metaphorically, looking for the bug in the system that is causing so much pain. While that story fits the gameplay if you squint, the problem is that it rarely ever touches what you actually do in the game. She Remembered Caterpillars has you walking little dudes of particular colors into end positions, something akin to Sokoban. The trick is that some paths can only traveled by a specific color, and certain gates prevent a specific color from passing. There are three colors to reckon with - blue, red, and yellow - each of which can be combined with one other color to create green, purple, and orange. Green can walk over blue bridges as blue is within green, but yellow cannot walk over green bridges because it is missing blue. It is simple enough, and the tight design of the puzzles makes some brain cookers, but that hardly has anything to do with the proposed plot.
From what I can tell, the idea was that working through putting primary colors in position was a sort of metaphor for coming to terms with and understanding the death of a loved one. The plot itself is told in snippets of dialogue or abstracted text from some sort of religious story at the beginning of every level, and throughout there are elements of something fairytale-like. There are references to a fungus and a cycle where the elderly allow themselves to die for the young, but it does little for the plot and only references the aesthetic in that the levels are generally designed with a lot of flora. It is a thin connection at best, and I found the drama of the story to be both on the nose and not particularly interesting. You get what is going on rather early, and each snippet of text from there on out is really just a slow, inevitable move towards the eventual end.
Aesthetically, the game is pretty good. Animations are smooth and full of character, the color pallet is pleasing, and the shapes feel both rudimentary and clear. On the most basic level, the game succeeds. The game is fun enough and is somewhat pretty to look at. But that leaves little to linger, little to come back to once the challenges have been overcome, and generally you feel "that was nice" and nothing more. There is a value in that, but not much of one. As far as distracting puzzlers go, She Remembered Caterpillars is inoffensive and pleasing, but I'd never go out of my way to play it.
6.0
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