Twisty Hollow is a delightful little puzzle game, I have close to nothing bad things to say about it and I'd recommend to all iOS owners that also are puzzle fans. The goal is quite simple, you rotate three circles (one representing workers, another representing tools and the third one representing materials) in order to fulfill requests from people. For instance, someone wanting bacon will require you to match a pig, a knife, and a butcher, but as the game goes and more complex recipes come into play you might have to match a fishing rod with the bait to get fish, then the knife, fish and chef to get sushi. The game keeps on adding new mechanics so it's fun to go through the motions.
While at first you can take your time and the tutorial levels only ask you to complete a set number of orders, after a few the game really kicks in with its basic set of rules, you have a set time to complete as much orders as you can and people will leave fires on the wheel - requiring you to match a firefighter and extinguisher before you can continue - and I thought this would be too stressful at first, but it didn't matter much. As long as you get a certain number of orders in, you pass the level and more harsh judgement is reserved for the number of stars you get in that level, a mechanic I find lacking since there is nothing to unlock with those stars. Your progress isn't gated by them and there is no 'meta-game' to speak of. I wish it did away with stars ratings and just asked me to serve X clients and stayed at that.
The progression works pretty well, adding new workers, clients and materials every so often and sometimes having special levels with certain mechanics in them - like your worker wheel automatically spinning by itself. Some levels are taking this a bit further with specific challenges, like a whack-a-mole boss fight of sorts. The themes of the level carry in their systems too - like the forest level where a big bear will eat any food item that passes through a certain spot on the wheel. I didn't to restart any levels for the time I've played this, both because it wasn't that hard and because I felt like when I was overwhelmed and didn't know what moves to make, I could just spin the wheels randomly until matches occurred, and go from there. Maybe a little 'stun' cooldown whenever you try to make nonexistent matches would've been fair and prevented that sort of 'brute-force attack'.
But in any case the core gameplay of TH is solid and I had a really enjoyable time with it. No IAPs too! A good puzzle game for iOS devices if I'd known one.
