In all honsety, I'm putting this game up there with the expert mode of super monkey ball. It's just insanse. It does share the tools that made smb great though, you can instantly restart a level with the press of the button, when you fail, and failing will come often here, you also get the turn back by one move feature, which is great for experimenting when your not sure , powering through with trial and error, or salvaging a run on one of the later puzzles. Together these make the game bearable.
You play as a square which flips from space to space, but it throws new things at you constantly. One of the most notable, is that gravity is determined in the direction that you move, and only for things you come into contact with, which is one of the hardest conceptual challenges I've faced in a long time. You'll have to deal with the cube based nature of the game on another level when you are asked to "cut' specific shapes into your square, using a raised platform to flip right, on top of it, and back down to present a different face to be cut.
Gameplay is pretty varied, and the game is semi non linear, as the unlocking process branches out early in the game, giving you some things to come back to if you are stomped to hard. For example, you can choose to work on whale after beating larva, or go straight to advanced larva, and later you can choose (freely, you get them all at once)between planting, half sided, and Larva+Whale, and planting itself leads to a further choice of advanced planting and garden.
Every new level brings something new to the table, and every one of the advanced levels turned out to not just be a "more of the same but super long now" but to creatively ask you to do something different. Also intereactions between the gravity ball from larva and the whale thing... turn out to be absoultely insanse.
This game is pretty much the benchmark for undiscovered gems for anyone who loves playing puzzles. It is almost entirely clever, and has an unusually amount of content for this genre of game. The time saving features make it seem fair. It does have a few sour spots... a handful of levels literally cannot be done in less than 7+ minutes, ramping up already crazy difficulty on an artificial level. They are very rare and unlikely to be encountered by anyone less than 15 hours in, or 9 if you have a ♥♥♥♥ ton of experience.
This game will be in your libraray for an insanely long time if you have the will to beat it. The graphics... grow on you after a while. While you are in some kind of geometrical nighmare puzzle world, the background is like a petri dish under a microscope with cell things just floating around or idling in place, and the level selection just looks amazing, although it is a bit unwieldy.
If you think you have become the god of all things puzzle;that you will never be beyond a weekend stand to learn the mechanics of some new gimmick game and master it : then English Country Tune will be your final trial before you can ascend to a higher plane. And it might just put you in your place.