Reviews

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Wow! What a surprisingly complete game! Not only the game itself was good, but the reward at the ending made this game have a sense of completion that you don't usually get from *hack games.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

That's one of the entry I played the most, mainly because it's hypnotic to search for spirits in the forest.
And snow !
A very good work.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

You are a blob with an inventory, going through a large forest and trying to cover it with snow. You can cut down trees, pick up mushrooms and flowers, and interact with NPCs - forest spirits. Each spirit will tell you what item and in what quantity they want. In return, they die and leave a bone - which again goes in your inventory.

The rules are generally followed: the spirits do the crafting for you; snow and pathfinding (by the player) are central to the plot; and the forest spirits chat with you when you stop by, sometimes in hieroglyphs which may well be poetry.

The graphics are deliberately pixelized. At start, you get an on-screen tutorial. The game lasts for a comfortable few minutes when you try most it has to offer and finally reach the goal. There is a nice reward for winning. And quite an eye for detail, too: for example, the forest spirits keep looking at you while you wander around.

Overall, this is a very pleasing and polished entry - thank you for the experience!

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

I really had high hopes for this game given the in-development screenshots, and indeed the game was pretty high quality. I enjoyed the minecraft game mechanic, although ultimately I found the gameplay a bit tedious. I found the idea of forest folk sacrificing themselves for snow to be pretty fascinating, evoking the often odd plot twists in JRPGs.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 2

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

This is seriously the best name ever for a game.

I actually really liked the parallax sense of depth, not just in the snow, but on the ground as well.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 1

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

It's not finished, but it compiled fine with a few tweaks (-std=gnu++11 && replace 5.2 by 5 for my system)
I liked the music and saw the potential behind the failure. Well tried.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

The player controls a green transparent rectangle. It can move left and right, and also jump. Snow falls in the background. The player may also go fullscreen and toggle debug info on screen.

While the above is a nice foundation for a game, the actual game didn't happen. Still, it looks like there is potential behind what was implemented. Kudos for submitting what worked anyway!

Regarding the rules, snow (art rule 2) is obviously in, and that's it.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

While understandably incomplete, I truly enjoyed the retro graphics and soundtrack combination. I wish it was a complete game :).

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 1

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Whell, it has what it promised.

Music is nice, and the snow is beautiful. I can't say more.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 1

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

It's a jumping box thing! Ok. So this is obviously not a complete entry. But this is one of the 10 submissions, so for that I applaud you. At least you've made it to the top 10!

The only rule that is clearly implemented is snow, so I encourage you with 3 points for arts, and 1 point for everything else.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 3 Technical 1 Genre 1

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

I really like the graphics and the controls. I dislike how the top left button sends me back to the main menu without warning (I lost all of my mana this way). The crafting system is pretty interesting, though I wasn't able to get anything other than "gibberish". Pretty cool game overall, the amount of polish is impressive.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

Ha. One of the entry I had hard time while voting. I don't like the game style at start, not particularly that one. BUT: it's well done and polished AND It's one of the only one who has a nice path finding feature.
That, I hope, explain my voting.
Very good job.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This is a turn-based tactics game. The player controls a wizard which fights goblins, and later, other beasts. A nice addition to the genre is crafting allies by pronouncing rhymed spells.

Regarding the rules, crafting and poetry are nicely combined, snow is the environment, Unicode is present in the spells' components, and pathfinding is perhaps used by the enemies.

For me, crafting the rhymed spells was hard, as there seem to be so many possibilities. I gave up and resorted to reading the first spell from the provided files to be able to test it.

Overall, the game lacks some presentation for what it has to offer. For example, it would be nice to have some in-game hints for the right spells, or better indication of available actions. But the level of these complaints actually shows that the level of what's implemented is already high. A very good entry!

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by jroatch all reviews by jroatch

Command your wizard to fight against the monsters in turn based tactics game.

Overall it is a bit difficult to play the game.
The title screen has some well done pixel art. The game's ground is snow, and you can make rhyming sentences for magic spells.
Technical aspects include A* path finding for movement and usage of UTF-8 text beyond ASCII.
While you do have to craft spells from words with a lot of trial and error, the true genre of the game seems to be a turn based tactics game.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

To be sincere, I don't know what to say. I wasn't able to play. I suspect that my screen is too small, as looks like the screen is "clipped" and should render more than I can see. For example, I suspect I can't see the first line of the poems and one line of words (I've open the spells.cfg file as suggested and I've found there are more words than the ones I can see). The only thing I can do is to supose that spells actually works.

Anyway, graphics are beautiful, and the game idea is quite original.

I'm really sad. :(

[Edit]
Played on another computer and confirmed that if you have a small screen it cut's things out.

The game is actually funny and beautiful. :)

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

It's a neat game. I like the graphics.

The idea of crafting spells is cool (a bit like ocarina tunes in Zelda maybe?) But I think guessing is too much, especially since you can't actually get most spells in the first level, so you'd be guessing in vain. It might work if the game gave you some hints, maybe by talking to NPCs or something like that.

A bit more feedback on the controls would be good. For example, there is not really a good indication that your turn is over, you have to understand that AP means action points and then notice that they are zero.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

A short, but fun experience.

I enjoyed collecting the haikus. The falling snow is a nice implementation of the snow requirement. The pathfinding is hit or miss though.

Adding more levels and improving the pathfinding would make the game more enjoyable.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

The entry is playable, and there was some ideas for the given rules.
Good !

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

You get a top-down view of a field with the main character, stumps, various other debris, and most importantly, pieces of paper. Each piece is either left, center, or right. There are four levels, and on level X, these pieces form X haiku verses. Whenever you collect all three parts of a verse, it is shown in two languages. When all verses on a level are collected, you proceed to the next level.

To get the pieces of paper, you just click on a cell of the field, and the character moves there, following a simple pathfinding algorithm. A nice touch: if you click while the character is moving, the target cell changes instantly. All pieces of the same kind (left, center, or right) look alike though, so you can't distinguish which haiku you just picked up until it's fully in your inventory.

As a weather effect, snow flies above the field (but somehow never actually falls), and as you progress through the levels, the green grass gets more and more white.

The game has an intro screen and a menu, but no final screen. It is technically solid. All rules (crafting, poetry, snow, pathfinding, Unicode) are obviously followed.

The game is straightforward: nothing obstructs your way, apart from some literal debris on the field which are easily walked around. All in all, a good experience for the few minutes of gameplay required to complete it.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

A simple game with a nice aesthetic. I wouldn't say I had great fun in it, but on the other hand, I found it completely inoffensive. The highlight was reading the nice haikus and a compelling snow particle effect.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by jroatch all reviews by jroatch

A short game of clicking on paper fragments containing haiku.
While much of the UI and ground debris implies that it was intended to be a deeper survival crafting game, but in it's current form it has been simplified to 4 rounds of gathering paper.

Overall fairly playable.
Artistically set in snowy field with OK looking chunky graphics.
Technically simplistic path finding with straightforward use of UTF-8 for the haiku. To be fair, fully automatic path finding would remove all the challenge.
and passable genre of craftsmanship when paper fragments automatically combine into full haiku.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Short, too short. It is very simple, but beautiful. The snow falls nicelly. Path finding is quite simple, but works.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Super cute game. I found myself tapping my foot along to the music.

I particularly liked the bunny animations. It made the game for me!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

An ambitious game for a speedhack!

Launching the game from the installer resulted in absolutely terrible frame rates, but there were no issues in launching the game outside of the installer.

This game reminds me of Tamagotchi and Neko Atsume. The music and sound effects are nice and relaxing, the graphics are decent enough, the interface is decent, the bunny behavior is fun to watch (I laughed when one of them slid across the snow), and the code is surprisingly clean. Well done!

The Japanese font is a bit too "curly" for easy reading, and the lack of refunds is frustrating. This really isn't a game to be played actively, but passively throughout the day. Getting money is slow, but that's just the nature of the game, I suppose.

Overall this is a solid game. Nicely done!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

That entry reminded me of the tamagoshi.
I once made one on TI-82.
I liked the concept, I would have loved moar money or a time speed key !
Nice entry with works behind.
Good job !

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This is a pet simulator game. The player has a room with rabbits who generally just wander around. The possible actions are to add or remove objects like boxes for jumping and food plates, refill the food, and add more rabbits! All additions come at a cost, but the rabbits somehow generate income by jumping.

Admittedly, I was not patient enough to fill the room with rabbits as it was in the development log screen, as each new rabbit costs more than the previous one.

About the rules: there are crafting the room contents, Unicode in the button with Japanese text which summons a new rabbit, snow sometimes falling from above, a haiku as the intro poetry, and perhaps pathfinding somewhere in the rabbits' electronic minds.

The graphics for walls, rabbits, food and snow are nice. As an additional effect, snow gets to the ground, and it gets slippery for the rabbits!

Overall, this entry is polished and well done.

Special thanks for taking the time in competition to write that inspirational post on allegro.cc forums!

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

I had trouble getting mouse clicks to register on my computer. It would only select a tile about 70%-80% of the time I clicked and it made it very difficult to race against the clock.

Nevertheless, I was able to get past the first couple of levels. Good job!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

A fun, albeit simple, tile matching game.

The visuals are good (I like the kanji on the tiles and the falling snow in the background), the use of a time limit is enjoyable and instills eagerness (and perhaps anxiety) in the player, and the overall gameplay is fast-paced and requires a touch of strategy. I am not sure how pathfinding fits in to the game though.

My only suggestions for the game would be to write instructions on the screen using text, rather than using a dialog, and adding more levels.

All in all, it's a good game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This game is a matching puzzle. There are pieces of five different kinds scattered across the screen. Your task is to click them in matching pairs, then the matching pieces go away. You compete against a timer, and also have a health bar which decreases when you click a non-matching pair.

The rules are somewhat followed: the pieces have hieroglyphs on them, matching can be seen as crafting pairs, snow falls in the background, and there is an attempt at poetry in the Readme.txt file. The use of pathfinding rule is however not obvious.

Unfortunately, the game suffered from a few bugs. First, a mouse click seems to be registered on every tick until you release the button - instead of once on mouse-button-down or mouse-button-up, so you have to guess an odd number of ticks to actually click something. Second, the time expires too fast, maybe because mouse clicks decrease the timer too, and there are too many of them because of the first bug. I didn't encounter another bug mentioned in the developer's log.

The bugs are perhaps fixed with just a few lines of patches, but they do impair gameplay. I've played a version where the timer was more allowing, and it was a nice albeit straightforward experience.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Lands of Magic is a stacked tile matching game featuring Chinese ideographs representing earth, sky, snow, water and fire. You are subject to a time limit, as well as a health bar which is depleted if you select tiles that don't match. Snowflakes drift downwards in the background and poetry appears in popup dialogues at various times.

This game was unfortunately affected by a couple of showstopper bugs. The author found one and posted a fix, and I found the other. Since mine affected timing, it seems likely that the 'fixed' game doesn't represent the author's intended difficulty level: the time limit is probably much longer than it should be. Therefore it probably isn't fair for me to judge the game as too easy, so I won't do that. It seems likely that with the right balancing, this game could be a very enjoyable frantic clickfest, so I am awarding a fair score in the 'overall' category.

The poetry is so embarrassingly bad, it's good. Rhymes are forced and in many cases don't even come close to actually rhyming. There is no consistent metre. Clearly this is just because our author's first language is French, which has a very different sense of rhythm and emphasis, and it does lend a certain charm to the game. It takes guts to publish such a thing, so I won't judge. Along with the inclusion of snow, this covers the artistic category.

Unfortunately since I saw no evidence of crafting nor pathfinding, I can't award points there. Apart from that, nothing stood out as excellent, but for what it is, it's certainly not bad. Bien fait mon ami !

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 1

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

Hey, a 3D game! Pretty impressive for a speedhack! The gameplay is decent, but the visuals are fairly bland.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

Impressive 3D entry.
The puzzle is good for a week made program.
Nice work Mark !

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This is a 3D game! However, the 3D engine was mostly developed outside the competition, and the game was a test for the engine.

The game itself is a very simple quest. You have to look around, move a bit - or is it just zoom? - and learn how to use the inventory. The correct sequence of actions takes only a minute or so.

Regarding the rules, there is one crafting action involving the inventory. There are a no-poetry confession and a winter picture on the walls. Not sure about Unicode, but the font looks nice. The pathfinding can be thought of as present in the player's actions.

Technically, the engine looks solid. However, in the HD version, mouse clicks were a bit off for me.

Overall, a nice demo for the engine!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

It's 3D!

Even though this was a very short, incomplete experience, I did like the aesthetic of it, reminding me a bit of Myst and Neverhood. Not quite enough content to truly be a great game, but the structure is all there.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 1

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

This game has a lot of potential. I think the use of colors and graphic design was particularly pleasant. With some nice transitions, some epic storytelling, and an engaging story that makes you want to solve the mystery, this game could be a lot of fun!

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

The fact that you wrote a working point-and-click engine so quickly is pretty impressive.

The graphics are simple, but work well enough, and the gameplay is nice. I'd really like to see this expanded into a bigger game.

Well done!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

I want a sequel of that entry.
It was cool and old school.
I liked it.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This game is styled as a side-view retro quest. The player controls a human-looking character in a room with a few objects, and the possible actions, like "Use" or "Look at", are listed in text at the bottom. The player clicks on an action and then on an object, and the character performs the action.

The engine worked fine for me. A nice detail: as the mouse goes over things, the game displays a textual hint, like "Use flask with poster", of what happens if a click is made. The graphics are also nice.

As for the rules, there are crafting (flasks), snow (obstacle), and Unicode (in the final text). No pathfinding or poetry visible.

The quest is understandably short, shorter than the excuse about it in the final text. Come on, that's OK for a weekend-made game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

I thoroughly enjoyed the aesthetic of this game, especially the crafting puzzle and the final book monologue. You don't tend to see adventure games in these hacks, and I was glad there was one entry, even if somewhat incomplete.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

At this point, the entry is a nice little engine for a point and click adventure.

You have to craft a potion by mixing two ingredients, and use it to escape the snow cave. There is a poster on the wall with a humorous poem that hints how to solve the puzzle. Your character walks where you click implementing the pathfinding rule, I think that this is especially nicely done. The only rule that seens to be unimplemented is the unicode rule.

Nicely done. All in all the game is too short unfortunately to receive the highest marks.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

I really liked this one!

The interface is nice and clean, and is visually appealing. I like how the text slots grow and shrink to fit the text that is placed within it. No complaints from me. Adding more content would be nice though. ;)

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

The idea of playing with text was good. It was playable but unreadable in the non European version.
Good try for the little time you put in.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Spring pits you as a master poet, crafting poems by dragging words into their rightful places. Each correctly placed word is indicated by a colour change. Slots snap to the size of the word placed in them, and when two of the same word exist, the game correctly accepts them either way round. For these touches I have awarded a fair technical score, despite the lack of pathfinding.

I have also awarded a fair artistic score, despite the lack of snow, since the game is built around poetry.

The onus is entirely on the player to decide whether to play 'properly' by trying to plan what word combinations seem best, or just to try everything everywhere until it fits. I would personally like to see the game recognise when players have worked harder, perhaps by scoring players better if they can craft the poems with fewer false placements.

The author admits that he had very little time for this entry, so what has come out is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Well done!

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by miquelfire all reviews by miquelfire

This game seems to be more of a victim of lack of time. There's really not much to go on with the rules. Only thing you'll really notice without effort is basically crafting (basically, the whole game), Unicode (Russian characters), and poems.

Snow is nothing more than a reference within the poems, and the title screen.

Pathfinding: Without reading the readme file, you'll think there's no pathfinding. The readme says the pathfinding is used to find out where the pieces of the poem belong.

As for the rest of the rules, it does make for a fairly decent game for the time frame this compo ran.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 5

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

Being able to read Russian, I enjoyed some nice Russian poetry. I think the gameplay was simple, but fair and not overly frustrating. The reward to read the final poem was pretty compelling. I enjoyed this game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Curious puzzle game. I like the interface, and how it is implemented. I was able to build the English poem even with my pood English knowledge.

Unfortunatelly, the "snow" requirement isn't accomplished. Also, some graphics, animations and sound may made it better.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

In this game you have to reconstruct a complete poem from a jumble of words. The game plays like a jigsaw puzzle: assuming you don't know the poems of Tyutchev or Dickinson by heart, it's possible to identify "corner pieces" by looking for capitals and punctuation, but in the end random guessing will also get you there - I managed to solve a few of the Tyutchev poems even though I can't read Russian.

The drag and drop mechanism works smoothly, it would probably possible to make this work on a touch interface.

The entry is inocomplete unfortunately, as far as I can tell, 3 out of 5 rules have been implemented: poetic form, crafting, and unicode. (the tagline "fight snow with verse" hints that there was a plan for more, but it's not implemented yet).

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

There's a lot going on in this game, but unfortunately I didn't have enough time to play by trial and error. A simple set of starter instructions would be great!

Otherwise, nice animations, and open-ended gameplay!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by Eric all reviews by Eric

Blowing up animals on the farm is fun, but figuring out how to play the game is a big pain in the butt. The lack of clear instructions greatly impedes upon my enjoyment of the game. I do like the sound effects and the in-game level editor though (very impressive). Adding instructions (and a windowed mode) would greatly improve the enjoy-ability, however.

**EDIT**
Bruce Perry explained the game in better details on the Allegro forums (https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616296/1023053#target), which prompted me to play again. The updated version with windowed mode improved my experience, and now that I know what everything does, it's a better game. I still think adding in-game instructions would have improved the overall experience, as would adding a "winnable" goal.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by GullRaDriel all reviews by GullRaDriel

Haaa, the farm. I enjoyed to make strange looking things that went blowing in all directions.
It was a fun entry and I enjoyed playing it, even if the building system confused me !!

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

This seems to be an Incredible-Machine-like simulator of whatever you engineer of the provided components. There are a few different species of farm animals on the field. You place some kind of machine on the field, along with instructions and additions, and also some food for various species, too. After that, you hit "Go", and the board inhabitants do their business while you read some nice home-brew poetry.

Regarding the rules, there are snow as one of the possible effects in your machine, the aforementioned poetry, crafting as the genre, pathfinding for animals seeking their matching food, and some Unicode in the text.

The overall feeling is that the game offers much more than it cares to explain. There are quite a few possible effects and interactions, but no tutorial, by text or doing or otherwise, to show them off properly. Still, the game engine works solidly, and exploring without any hint whatsoever can be seen as a flavor of fun.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by miquelfire all reviews by miquelfire

Writing games from scratch, a pain that can leave you with no time to add some polish that at least makes the game playable without waiting on reviews. I'm sure if there was reusable code to be had for the programmer, this would be a great game.

Overall, the rules are clearly in place. The only iffy bit would be the snow, but it's there at least.

This game might be more fun if at least the readme tried to explain what everything did, and polished if there were an in-game tutorial of sorts.

Sadly, I'm lacking time to even give this game a just review, and from what I seen, I might be giving it too low of a score for overall as a result. I really wish my free time didn't end with the compo...

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

I don't think I've ever caused as much mayhem with farm equipment as I have in Mr Perry's farm. While the game doesn't give much hint as to what you're meant to do in it, creating contraptions whose only purpose, it seems, is utterly demolish poor farm animals caused a lot of mirth to be had in my experience. Unlike most other games, crafting truly had a functional impact on the game that allowed the player to use his creativity to affect the game world.

To the extent that this is a bit of a sandboxy game, I also liked the inclusion of the map editor, which enabled me to create levels of destruction not imagined even by the game's creator.

I particularly enjoyed the poetry and the Japanese exclamations uttered by the animals.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Tryed in two different computers (32bit and 64 bit) with two different OS (WinXP and Win7): Both them failed with exception "Bad file description". Could not vote.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This games involves crafting a weird contraption made of self-replicators, bombs and weather generators, farm animals, and then blowing it all up.

Crafting stuff and then destroying it all again is a tried and tested concept since "Lemmings" and "Sim City", so I think you're definitely on to something here.

As a puzzle concept it is all very experimental. It certainly takes a few tries to see where it's all going, and I'm not sure if it can stand on it's own as a puzzle game, but it should be able to with a few tweaks. Maybe if you added something about growing food using sun and rain? Maybe some clever arrangements of food could give you multipliers? Also, it seems that farm animals may occupy the same tile, so they overlap and you can't see exaclty how many there are (and this supresses the mayhem a little). The game throws you in the deep end, a bit more time tweaking the puzzles and introducing concepts gently would have changed this from a decent entry into a great entry.

Also, this game features the best home-made poetry of all entries this year.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 5