Treehouse Riddle Review

Treehouse Riddle is a pure puzzle game where you'll take control of a young girl completing riddles and puzzles within a treehouse.

Treehouse Riddle is a straightforward game and relatively short if you're good at puzzles too. Although there is an underlying story, I won't be mentioning it as it neither affects the gameplay nor is it long enough for me to note a sizeable amount before delving into spoiler territory. Instead, let's focus on the gameplay!

Starting off the game, you'll be in a room that doesn't have anything aside from a couple of interactable items and a puzzle that will work as your introduction to the gameplay mechanics. Simple and straightforward, Treehouse Riddle takes no time to throw you into the action, and I sincerely appreciate that!

You'll be passing several puzzles and riddles across four chapters (and four additional "extra" chapters we'll get to later). Each one is relatively short, with a little less than ten puzzles per chapter, but the complexity grows exponentially with each passing one.

The first couple of puzzles are relatively simple — if you've browsed online for puzzles, you'll likely be familiar with them. Some took me only a couple of seconds to finish (one I even finished within the first 10 seconds, which I was extremely proud of!), whilst others will take only a few minutes. After you complete every puzzle inside of a room, you'll get all of the clues to unlock the final one, which boils down to figuring out a single English word from pieces of paper you put together. Oftentimes, the last puzzle was the least amusing of the bunch, as figuring out what each part could mean to get an entire word was one of the least exciting puzzles you'll see in Treehouse Riddle, but it didn't detract from the experience. 

Each new chapter introduces new types of puzzles (including dreaded maths ones) or repeats a previous one with increased complexity. The types of puzzles are enjoyable and exciting, though my favourites will always be the chess ones, where you need to play with a specific piece and meet a particular requirement. A neat hint system offers you different levels of pointers that you can take advantage of, starting by giving you the name and instructions of the puzzle (allowing you to just have a go at it without knowing the goal or skip a tutorial for one you know already) and then unlocking increasingly-specific hints. The hints are a bit more giving than I like for some of them, sometimes even solving a part of the puzzle for you, but it helps to ensure that you can finish it one way or another. That said, I do wish that there had been more vague hints rather than specific ones, as there were times I wanted to know more about the puzzle rather than how to solve half of it.

With Treehouse Riddle being one of the most challenging titles I've ever reviewed, it's nice that developer Marudice doesn't gatekeep its game by forcing you to finish them, as you'll be able to automatically complete any puzzle, so long as you have all of the necessary pieces to solve it. This allows you to skip it, which makes it automatically finish and doesn't give you the answer so that you may come and tackle it again in the future.

This was incredibly handy in some of the more complex ones that I couldn't solve, allowing me to continue enjoying the other puzzles that I did find to be enjoyable without having to worry about getting stuck again a couple of seconds later. This also comes in handy with the very difficult "Extra" chapters, where Treehouse Riddle ramps the difficulty by 11 and then multiplies that by 10 (can you tell that the maths riddles broke me?). The beginning puzzle alone makes sure that you know: you're likely too stupid (like me) to finish it. And even then, the skip function is available, allowing you to play the puzzles you actually want to — I never had to do a maths puzzle again.

All of this makes Treehouse Riddle an incredibly complex and satisfying puzzle title. The simplicity of the puzzles is a bittersweet feeling, as it makes them easy enough to solve but makes you feel stupid for being unable to solve them. And although I did appreciate seeing some old classics, the lack of innovation in some of the puzzles made the game feel less appealing in the later stages.