Written: 2026 June 12
Rating: 5/5
Theta overtook A Monster's Expedition as my favorite puzzle game of all time. I reached the first ending and finished all the numbered levels, and I want to continue and 100% the game. First of all, the theme and mechanics in this game is extremely unique. Controlling multiple characters is always going to be finicky, and even after I've finished the game, it is still finicky. However, very few if any of the levels that I've solved are reliant on difficult positioning of multiple characters.
The prologue and first chapter is a bit like Stephen's Sausage Roll where you kind of have to suffer through the strange movement rules before you get to the actually interesting stuff. If you want to play this, you should be prepared to stay with it until you get to chapter 2. If you are in chapter 2 and it still is not fun, then the game is probably not for you. Every mechanic introduced is super interesting and more than justifies the jank from the base movement rules. Theta also inspired me to learn about quantum mechanics and the many worlds interpretation.
The puzzle design is really good, on par with greats like Magicube, Stephen's Sausage Roll, and Snakebird. However, not ALL the puzzles are great. There are some levels (Chapter 6's Sword of Damocles in particular comes to mind) where the difficulty comes more from the constrained level space rather than the deductions required to come up with a solution. This is definitely the exception and not the norm, which is good.
Now, my major criticism: the overall user experience of the game. The game feels unpolished. English translations are not good. Some things that I've noticed include: UI elements overlapping, or getting cut off at the edges of the screen (this was adjusted after I reported it in the Steam Discussions forum). The grid-based movement feels slightly off, not as smooth as other games. Sometimes I see light flashes across the screen, and I think it's the fork particle effect doing weird things. Sometimes the particle that the fork has is nice looking trail, other times it's a blocky orbiting rectangle. In chapter 3 and 6 specifically, the amount of timeline splits actually lags the game. One time in chapter 6, the lag persisted and I had to restart my game. However, I'm willing to deal with all this because the puzzle solving is just that much fun. According to the discussion forums, this game was AI-coded, but the puzzle design is definitely not. Without AI-coding I guess the alternative is that it wouldn't have been made into a game at all, which would be a shame.
edit - per the dev's comment on the Steam review, development was not reliant on AI coding.
edit - 100%'d the game. The post-game levels vary a lot in quality. 3-0 is controversial. I spotted the noise pretty easily. You could call it a red herring, and I can totally see players getting frustrated by it. My favorites would be the meta levels like 1-Z, 3-U, and the entirety of 0-U through 0-Z. The difficulty spike in post-game levels is extremely noticeable, barring a few exceptions that were solved within 5 minutes. Do I regret going for the 100%? No, but looking back on it, it hasn't heightened my enjoyment of the game. The regular game is overall way more fun mostly because of all the insane new mechanics introduced throughout.
As a side note, I think that the difficulty of the post-game, and the difficulty of late Maxwell is beyond my enjoyment. The amount of time & effort I had to put in to solve these difficult levels was nowhere near the amount of dopamine I get when I eventually find the solution.