Vortle

Vortle is a pleasant and inclusive set of activities designed for the neurodiverse, those living with a disability, and those with various mental illnesses. I wanted to review this game in particular, both to help those who might live with a challenging situation, but also to spread more awareness about neurodiversity and mental illnesses, which really caught my attention when I was offered to do a review for this game. Thank you to the developers for creating such a thoughtful set, and I hope that many find benefit from it.
~ People who are neurodiverse or have a mental illness often face discrimination, so please take a moment to consider how we treat others, especially those who seem different to us.
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~ House Blythe, curator for Non-violent Entertainment:

5/10 Tetris and match-3 in the context of relaxation.
The app lets you play Tetris and Match-3 in "endless" mode without score counting or difficulty increase. You can select several 3D-rendered relaxing backgrounds. Also there is an in-built music player with a few chill sound tracks and advice-like song names, e.g. "relax your shoulders" or "set boundaries".
Good:
- free
- pleasing though simple graphics of the game elements
- nice-looking backgrounds
- the bits of advice this game gives are actually very needed. E.g. I just noticed that I never relax my shoulders and tend to play with clenched jaws <- stuff that the game keeps telling you in a fade-in dialog each time you start a game.
- playing an unscored game is an interesting take. Indeed, it's all about the process, not the result. Who cares what score you got in Tetris? What matters is the interesting decisions you had to make during the game.
So-so:
- the dev replied to another review that this wasn't supposed to be a commercial project. Indeed, there are thousands of implementations of Tetris or Match-3 and many ready templates that work better out-of-the box and have far more features. As a game, this app is certainly not interesting for more than it takes to just look through all the buttons on the starting screen and see what they do. Still, the purpose of this app is to act as a reminder: your health is all you got, and most of the problems you stress about are actually illusory
Bad:
- in Tetris, the shapes only move 2-3 tiles when you hold Left or Right key. So, you have to press keys repeatedly to move the shape. This makes the game annoying instead of relaxing. I'm not sure but the issue may be that the game is reacting to key down events that come from Windows, instead of just regularly checking if a key is down or not
"set boundaries" song has a typo
Don't treat this app as a game. If you are a perfectionist and a super-busy hyper-achiever like myself, this app is a reminder: death awaits you if you stress out too much. And then everything was in vain. There must be a healthy balance. Your body has its limits. And your willpower has only so much leeway until your body breaks.
I'm a Steam curator, you can follow me

A lot of thought has gone into removing as many triggers as possible from these simple games to make them nice calming activities when you need a short mental health distraction. I found this app more useful than meditation apps like head space which can be difficult to engage with if you are in a stressed state. Sometimes you need a distraction like a game, but most games are predatory and designed to be stimulating and addictive - this app aims to address that.
Would love to see this be fleshed out even more.
Pros:
- Calming game sound that doesn't change in intensity (e.g speeding up as you reach higher levels etc)
- No disruptive pop-ups or ads, no paywall services
- No score counter, easy to break away from the activity when needed
- Muted colours and animations
Cons:
- No obvious keybind for rotating tetris pieces on pc
- Tetris pieces not differentiated by colour
- Would maybe be nice to include some links to self help resources/information
- You can set a timer, but maybe after a set period of constant play, a non-interruptive pop-up prompting users to take a break would be a nice idea 'Hey, you've been playing for a while, don't forget you can pause anytime and take a break to move around, maybe get a drink or a snack'
- Could be finished a little nicer, but it is a personal project so I get it

The coloring is calming. No point system, no push for competition, just watch tiles move.

TETRIS WITH NICE BACKGROUNDS CAW CAW
NEEDS MORE MUSIC FROM COLUMNS CAW CAW

Before I played Vortle, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good

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