Reviews

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 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

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 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 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