One mistake I keep making with puzzle games is conflating the presentation with its challenge level. Specifically, the way most puzzle games endeavor to swaddle its audience of mostly casual players in a warm and welcoming atmosphere and simple, intuitive UIs built for devices of any size and power, and how that's never any indication as to how much hair-pulling may or may not be involved as it continues to ratchet up the difficulty. Inbento is definitely one of those puzzle games where it starts small and straightforward, gradually introduces a series of new mechanics throughout the first half of its inventory of puzzle scenarios, and then spends the second half taking everything you've learned and constantly raising the challenge level.

Ever since I started this very restrictive diet where I can only eat food that rhymes with my own name, I've been contemplating the humble bento quite a bit of late (and, honestly, getting pretty sick of pimento olives). The versatility and color variance of the possible food selections combined with that cosy square packaging make them very appealing on an aesthetic level alone, and that's something Inbento builds upon for its equally cosy gameplay. Shuffling around a three-by-three grid of vaguely recognizable foodstuffs and then concluding with a gentle, ASMR-worthy "pof" as the bento's cap comes down to accentuate the successful completion of the puzzle is the kind of positive stimulation feedback loop that keeps you pressing on even as the puzzles become unpalatably tricky to work out.

Early on you're simply assembling an array of cuboid food "blocks" inside the bento in the shown order like piecing together a Tetris grid or rearranging your inventory in a loot RPG, using a limited selection of "moves" in your "hand" at the bottom of the screen. The game then gradually introduces new moves that, instead of involving placing food blocks down in different configurations, it'll move food around that's already in the grid. After that, you get moves that will clone blocks and place them somewhere in the grid, and those that let you pull those food blocks out and place them in your hand to be placed again elsewhere. Once all these mechanics have been introduced, the rest of the game simply finds more challenging combinations and configurations for them.

Afterburn, the developers, previously worked on another puzzle game that I covered here almost a year ago to the day: Golf Peaks (IGotW #213). As with Golf Peaks, the trick to Inbento is figuring out the right order to use all your available moves - I've yet to reach a solution that didn't use all of them - and sometimes it becomes easier to suss out the solution by working backwards. For instance, if there's more objects of a certain type in the completed puzzle than there are initially, you know that logically at some point you've got to add more. That might also mean that you cannot afford to lose any of that type that are already in the grid: no overwriting them by putting a different block on top. Once you can narrow down where the right number of specific blocks come from, you can use that as a basis to determine the right order of moves to place. Not a perfect system, but it's been helping me narrow down what can be an extremely high number of combinations to explore.

Framing the whole game is a cute story about a cat mother who started creating bento lunchboxes for her child, and then the game follows the child as they grow up, is inspired to become a chef themselves, and then eventually has their own child to feed. You get dialogue-free snapshots of this little narrative play out after every set of levels (naturally, these sets are arranged in three-by-three grids too). I managed to get as far as the twelfth set of levels (of fourteen) before my brain started leaking through my ears, but I might hop in from time to time to see if a refreshed mind can work through these roadblocks easier. I might say Inbento is overall more difficult than Golf Peaks, but then I only started running into real melon-scratchers around the ninth or tenth set of levels: as was the case with Golf Peaks, the introduction of each new mechanic was accompanied by a slight dip in the challenge quotient so players could easier integrate those mechanics into their approach. (It might also be that I'm a completely different frame of mind from when I played Golf Peaks, or have just stupider in general. A whole extra year of lockdown can do that to a person, I'm sure.) If some potentially bean-freaking logic/spacial awareness puzzles don't scare you away, Inbento is a very cute and pleasant way to pass the time and maybe work up an appetite in the process.

Rating: 4 out of 5.