Back on Tract, created for the Indie Game Maker Contest 2015, is a strange incoherent puzzle game with 5 or so levels, where you grow a vine up a cliff, using some form of weird resource management to make sure you get to the end. The story is difficult to follow, and it feels like that portion of the game was rushed, or not much care went into it.

I'll be honest and say that I didn't catch much of anything that the story was trying to convey. The characters all had these weird "VX Ace character generator", that are somehow even weirder than the usual faces that come out of the generator. Even then, their dialogue was more wacky than their faces. I couldn't decipher almost a single thing. There seemed to be splotches of parody, self-parody, obscure jokes that it seems only the author could understand, and a general plot about a rocket, a romance and a trip to the sky? It seems as if parts are deliberately silly, and I didn't catch most of what was going on. Apart from the opening cutscene, most aren't that dynamic, in fact the characters do not seem to move much at all.

The gameplay uses interesting systems that must have required the developer to use a lot of logic in order to implement, but it fails to provide good puzzle design, in that solutions are often arbitrary and inconsistent in difficulty. There seems to have been put a lot more effort into creating the mechanics themselves, than designing stages that would test these to their upper limit.

The gameplay consists of creating vines according to resources of water, and fulfilling stage-specific objectives. It is such a weird concept that I have to give the game points for originality, but deductions for execution. The systems are so confusing, and when they are simple, they are too simple, such as moving until you run out of water, then using an equivalent of a "water potion" to revitalize your vines. I still don't know why they were trying to grow vines everywhere.

There is a stage (I believe it is stage #3) that effectively uses the tiles that the author has chosen for the puzzles, and creates a sense of strategy for the level, but that is the only level that requires such skill. The rest are widely varying in quality, one of them only taking around 30 seconds to complete with very little effort whatsoever.

The graphics are RTP, and they could definitely be mapped several levels better, especially near the beginning. There is a teleporter that is used, that is of a lower resolution than the rest of the map. The architecture of the first city has buildings that look strangely proportioned, as well as cliffs that wind around but with skewed sense of depth or direction. One can blame this on the RTP if they wanted, but I don't think we should take that into account.

Overall
Back on Tract is such a thoroughly confusing and strange game to the point of it being indecipherable. The ending is extra abrupt, with such little resolution that it will likely leave even the most battle hardened of players cheated. It manages to squander a wacky and baffling gameplay idea with poor puzzle level design, and what seemed to me to be a very incoherent story.

However, I see potential in the developer to make strange and wacky games - if they could tame them with at least a little playtesting and some advice on the puzzles, by giving them a look from an outsider's perspective.

I give Back on Tract a 1.5/5, with room for improvement.