Reviews

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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