Whimsy is the first game Madison Karrh published on Steam, and it’s free.

It’s quite different from the games that came after it, the style is more premature and experimental than what we are able to see with Landlord of the Woods, and the palette is far darker.

However, the general atmosphere and feeling so unique to the following games are pretty much already there: eerie creatures, morbid and surreal details, mysterious settings and happenings, that uneasiness about what you’re looking at and doing.

About the graphics themselves, if the newest works have a very “iPad-ish”, more modern and polished style, a lighter and more neutral palette, this one reminds me of the old Flash games you would have found on several sites back in the early 2000s, like Adult Swim (good times!).

If we want to remain in more recent works and in the real game development field, Rusty Lake’s games can be another good connection, with Karrh’s works being more relaxed and fairy than anxious and horror.

So it has its fair part of allure as well. At least for me, because what Madison Karrh does is my “fly movements on the spider’s web”.

Have you ever tried to take a blade of grass and tickle a spider web, trying to be believable enough to trick the spider about a prey enmeshed on its sticky threads and make it show?
If you did, then you know perfectly what I mean. If you didn’t, it’s enough for you to try to imagine the scene.
She’s the fly, I’m the spider.
Her games tickle my web so perfectly to lure me out of my dark, moldy and cold hole in the wall immediately. I can’t really resist.

Give me graphically surreal games full of “what am I even looking at?” and unexplained story and details and I’ll be automatically on board.

The game is a sort of ancestor of Karrh’s following games.

Despite it being quite different and less polished from her newest works, if observed carefully you would identify aspects that will then become more characteristic of her.
It’s fascinating to see not only how her graphic style evolved one game after the other, but also how she developed her own preferences about all the puzzles you find in each work.

In Whimsy you won’t find physics-based puzzles yet, but you can already see logical ones and hints scattered among different scenes.

I’ve said that Whimsy reminds me of Rusty Lake’s games and, if I were to point my finger at a specific one, I’d say Rusty Lake Paradise, not for the story or the setting, but for the emotions I felt while playing and discovering bits and pieces of what was happened and was happening.
Yes, both games are set in a forest, both games have a strange, mysterious and spiritual/religious plotline and both have hand-drawn graphics with a “Old Flash vibe”.

In my opinion, Whimsy (but we could say all Madison’s games) is well-balanced, placed in a good position between difficulty and creativity: more than once I’ve found myself solving a puzzle even before realizing what I was supposed to do, just messing around with the elements but despite this I’ve felt they were too easy or too obvious.
Then, there are puzzles intentionally easy, others intentionally more challenging, the constant element is your satisfaction.

You aren’t forced to come up with a solution in just one, linear way, set by the developer, like sometimes happens with puzzle games. You’re free to explore, try, go searching yourself for hints and clues and not always the puzzles must be solved in a strict succession, a specific one after a specific one. It may happen to solve a puzzle, then get stuck in another one so you go to a third one and distract yourself or go searching for clues before returning there and try to solve it again.

If you aren’t a “super expert” in puzzle games, then you too difficult but not too easy as well,

Obviously this depends a lot on your personal skills and natural tendency for puzzle-solving: if you consider yourself not good in solving puzzle, it doesn’t matter if you like this kind of games or not, then you might find the puzzles harder, counterintuitive or even illogical, hard to understand or else.

Around an hour, the time I spent on a couple of hostile-to-me yet very interesting puzzles included.

Very similar to what we find in the following works.

A simple and subtle soundtrack, never too on foreground, relaxing and dreamy on one side but that leaves you that “weird feeling” on the other one.

A single track throughout the whole game.

No – Black Screen
No – Crashes
No – Freezes
No – Glitches
No – Lag
No – Loading Problems

I’ve experienced just a single bug, with the 4-wheels puzzle. I solved it at one point, but the wheels weren’t aligned correctly. Since I’ve messed around with them, I feel that something broke between the visual art and the value connected to each slice of the wheel.
Nothing too serious but it can compromise the solution of the puzzle. If you feel you’ve find the solution but it doesn’t work, try to restart the game (Although I had understood the solution, the puzzle solved itself by accident while I was trying to understand why it wasn’t working, so I didn’t have time to restart the game).