Mind bending puzzles can usually be one of two things: really fun or really frustrating. It’s hard to balance difficulty because you want to engage the audience, but you don’t want to make puzzles impossibly frustrating. That Level Again for Android is a mind bender that happens to fall somewhere in the middle.

The first time I booted it up I assumed it was another platformer. After all, there were platforms, and some of those platforms had spikes on them. To some extent it is, but it’s mostly a puzzle game. The level design remains mostly static in design, but every level starts off with a hint about what you need to do to solve the ‘puzzle’.

Starting off, things were a little confusing to me until I understood how they wanted me to think. Most of the hints are really vague and force you to think outside of the box, which is totally fine.

Unfortunately, sometimes the cipher just seemed too hard to break. There is a hint system, but it never seemed to work for me. The controls were another aspect of the game that was really off. Sometimes the game would manipulate the controls to trick you, which is fine. But the responsiveness definitely wasn’t. Everything seemed really floaty, and you have to be precise in order to make sure the controls do what you want them to.

I really like the idea behind That Level Again, and I don’t think enough mobile games really take the risk it does. It doesn’t hold your hand, and the puzzles really do make you think. Unfortunately, the game lacks a lot of polish it needs to really be good.