Understand

It's okay, but I tapped out midway through stage 4-6. It starts out strong, but becomes less about "understand" and more about "guess".
So The Witness is what you're going to compare it to. There's two goals in that game.
1. Understand the rules
2. Solve the puzzles given your understanding of the rules.
But in The Witness, the rules stay the same the whole game and you get the satisfaction of solving puzzles. In Understand, the rules change every single stage. The intro levels to each stage are minimal and follow a pattern that is set up to deceive you. Then by the 5th board comes the predictable curveball "Aha, you actually *don't* understand the rules for this stage!". So you go back to the intro levels to see what incorrect assumption you made, but the intro levels are so tiny there's not much room to experiement or learn more. You eventually do guess correctly and you get the privilege of solving one or two *actual puzzles* before moving on to the next board, with all fresh rules, and the guessing process begins all over.
And to be fair, some of these rules are pretty goofy. The prime number one I actually did get, but god that was a slog. Counting out free spaces on a 8x10 board isn't very fun either.
I like solving puzzles and guessing at rules, but the balance is all out of whack. A game 25% of the length with consistent rules would have been a better choice IMO
One possible course of action is to read the level guide that gives you the rule hints for each stage, and then you can simply enjoy the puzzles. I considered this. Maybe I'll come back to it later.
Overall it's a neat game, and you can't go wrong with the price. I got my money's worth. It's not a bad game, it just overstayed its welcome for my personal taste.

Have you ever taken an online IQ test and then when the test was over instead of wanting to know your score, you were upset because they took your puzzles away? If so, then you are the ideal player for this game.
There are no instructions but it is easy to figure out what the game wants from you. Some levels will come easily and some will stump you enough that you'll need to come back weeks or months later. I wish certain levels weren't way harder than the rest, but maybe a different person would struggle with different ones.
I like the clean design with nothing extra or wasted. The sounds effects are perfect. No complaints.

Currently halfway through the game. Actual playtime is 19 hours; I accidentally left game on in the background overnight.

I like how individual puzzles are of medium difficulty and take about 15 minutes to solve, so I can play a puzzle during a short break. Chapters are independent of each other, you don't need to master one thing in order to progress. Level design is very elegant; I like how each chapter has the same number of puzzles and commits to its theme.

There's a few later puzzles that took ages to figure out or were maybe a bit too convoluted (like it was easy to stumble into correct solutions to the earlier puzzles in the segment without really learning how to solve the later puzzles in the segment), but besides those this is a pretty solid puzzle game with simple mechanics.

"circle to square... circle to square... circle to squaah, thats not a square."
"im just kinda drawing the line and hoping it - holy moly i solved it"
"not rule 1, not rule 1, not ru - THAT'S RULE 1??????"
"i understand it now! *draws line* ...hmm"
"three plus one equals four, four plus three equals seven, seven plus two... does not equal nine, apparently"
10/10 aha moments game

this game is surprisingly funny to me even though it's a puzzle game
very fun to tinker around and test what I think the rules are
... and then realize that I have it completely wrong :-)

This was a fun game for what I was able to play, however some levels, namely 1-7 and 1-10, wouldn't allow me to complete them even when it said I had followed every rule. However, if you ignore this you'll have a great time!