Buy it, but not full price. The game grows on you, but won’t keep you busy long enough to justify a full price purchase.
You don’t get many levels. The first few levels are really easy. The next couple of dozen are interesting, challenging, but pretty straight forward, without any real sense that you are solving a puzzle or making any sort of decision – you just follow the path. Then the later levels are just infuriating. So, you end up with a couple of dozen quietly interesting little linear levels to follow, and after you’ve got the hang of them you’ll find that you can play through all the worthwhile levels in half an hour or so. Could the developer have put in multiple paths, more options for the way the ball behaves, more puzzle elements, enemies….? Sure. But they didn’t.
What they did put in was music that makes you smile every time you hear it, some cute little characterisations for the ball with endearing sound effects, and some simple but pleasing backgrounds.
The result is that the game is quietly, emotionally satisfying, time after time, without ever getting particularly interesting. It’s calmingly, charmingly entertaining. It’s the sort of game that you can chill out to really easily, but never get excited by. That makes it sound like a “rent it, don’t buy it game”, but actually you won’t want to give it back to the store after a day or two. What you probably will want to do is to hang onto it and dip into it from time to time. So, buy it, don’t rent it – but make sure you buy it cheap.