You’d think making casual-friendly puzzle games on the Switch would give you a certain degree of latitude. Since the casual space generally isn’t in a race to make the toughest, flashiest, or most jaw-dropping games, instead focused on relaxed fun, grading them should also be pretty forgiving. Right? Absolutely wrong, at least for someone who has played hundreds of them, and is then able to clearly see which ones are better made and which aren’t.

Summer Unpacked has that light sort of fun vibe to it in terms of its presentation. It isn’t out to win any awards for its beauty, but it does at least have a consistent aesthetic that’s nice. Another plus is the fact that on a general level it isn’t beholden to any specific puzzle type, instead moving in a pretty freeform way from one style to another, keeping itself from being pigeonholed into having only one flavor of play to offer. In this regard it has some similarities to the likes of A Little to the Left and some others, offering a bit of variety and keeping things fresh.

Where it fails to meet the standard established by those other more successful titles of its kind out there has to do with the clarity in what you’re doing. If you’re going to shift around between styles of play, in order to keep the player on board it’s important that they’re able to understand what they should be doing. While you could certainly include in-game instructions of some sort, games that are truly next level are designed well enough that they can use visual cues or a progression of simpler puzzles with similar mechanics to teach you how to play later more complicated ones. 

Unfortunately, Summer Unpacked really falls on its face here. If it were a one-off issue it would be one thing, but I was having a pretty consistent problem with it, needing to trial and error my way through some puzzles, failing to understand what I was supposed to be doing or what the rules should be. Worse, when I would stumble onto what needed to be done, even knowing what was working it usually felt like a lazy or unintuitive rule that was being applied. This undercuts the sense of it being a puzzle game, where you’d have the satisfaction of well-applied logic, and replaces it with a sense that you’ll simply fail your way to success, with the problem being a total lack of any guidance, so it’s an unforced error that undermines the experience.