Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

It a puzzle game. Your goal is to move a disc to a hexagon.
* First level: straight line to the goal. easy
* Second level: down the stairs. Not much of a challenge either.
* In the 3rd level you have to jump. Jumping inconsistent - you can only jump some of the time.
* In the 4th level, we use the gravity turning effect to win the map. If you roll around a corner, gravity turns so stick to the block.
* In the 5th level, the goal is above you. The way I solved it seems to be more glitchy than how it was intended: if you jump up at the end of the horizontal bar, you glitch through the vertical bar and end up near the goal. It doesn't feel like this is how I should solve it, but I don't know any other way. If you make any movement while you are glitching inside a block, you lose all contact with the map and fall towards infinity.
* In the 6th level, the target hexagon disappears when you try to touch it. I tried jumping towards the hourglass, but this always ends up either with a hard crash or a fall towards infinity. I haven't been able to get further than this level.

Overall: 2. The glitchiness really makes it less enjoyable than it could be.
Art: 3. Nice art style, decent plug, and the link with Escher is clear. I think the art of the game is the best aspect of this entry.
Tech: 2. Hexagon is there, but it doesn't really contribute to a game mechanic. The game engine doesn't feel very solid, technically speaking.
Genre: 3. I like the idea of a game with a laugh track. Having said that, the made up Escher quotes aren't super funny...

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 3

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Wow, this is a great entry. It's clear that lots of work went into this.

There is a lot of content to explore. The game is set in a series of rooms connecting in a hallway that is covered with hexagonal 'redrum' carpet. There is lots of witty, fourth-wall breaking dialog full of random pop culture references. I love the robot model, which you inserted as a plug for your own work, which incongruously occupies one of the rooms. The game starts with overhead view, but for some rooms the camera shifts to a different perspective (e.g. birds eye view) which is a nice surprising effect.

There are a few puzzles I haven't been able to figure out. I have found a key in a maze in the cellar, and there is a locked door in your apartment. When I leave the maze, it says 'got it', but I still can't open the locked door.

The puzzles are quite basic - the puzzles are sokoban-like, but definitly not as difficult. The game uses a real physics engine for moving the blocks, and you can move blocks in any direction: push, pull, and sideways. This gives you great freedom but makes most puzzles easy. I believe more restrictive tile-based movement of blocks would have worked just as well, actually felt more precise, and would have allowed you to design more interesting puzzles. In some places it's also possible to glitch blocks into the hallway. Even though you control two players, I believe every puzzle can be solved solitary. This seems like an idea that was left unfinished.

The game is very quiet most of the time, until the moment that you start playing with the beats that you've collected, which is the whole goal of the game. I don't know if it was a conscious choice to keep the rest of the game without music - I can understand it fits the storyline, but it does make the rest of the game feel a bit less atmospheric than it could have been.

Another nitpick: the game uses a lot of buttons to control. There is a helpful explanation screen, but a bit more contextual help would be nice. To give an example, sometimes a dialog starts while you're trying to solve a puzzle. You can keep playing the game while the text is showing, so you can ignore it, and then you discover only later that there is a lot more dialog waiting for your key press.

But what I'm really missing is some sort of progress indicator. I managed to score up to 10210 so far, but it's not easy to find out if this is good or bad. There is at least one sample clearly missing for me (behind the locked door), and maybe there are others I haven't found yet.

Overall: 5. Excellent game, really playable. Lots to discover. The puzzles could be harder.
Art: 5. The puzzles with the 3D stairs, and the constant shifting perspective, give this a clear Escher vibe. The plug is cool. The game looks good and is stylish.
Tech: 3. Hexagons are there but I feel they're not that important to the game. There is some glitchiness in the 3D environment. For example, pushing blocks into the hallway. Also the hallway walls sometimes disappear and I'm not sure if that's on purpose.
Genre: 4. The writing on this is really funny.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This game actually made me laugh. The writing is terrific. Dialogs are very witty, full of puns and jabs. Trashtalk cans? Pedestriangles? Hexagon square? I see what you did there! Hmmm, this guy is hard to reach, I wonder what he has to say. "Oh, you walked all the way around to talk to me? How nice!". There are inside jokes too (after all, how many people will know that P. Pils is an old nickname for his Royal Highness King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands?) All the dialogs make the city really feel like a living place, with lots of culture and lore behind it.

The game plays like an old fashioned RPG. You have to do various quests for the inhabitants of the city of shapes. Moving items back and forth between NPCs to advance the plot. No combat mechanic though, as the game itself dryly notes.

The really cool thing is that the items you collect can change your shape! You start as a kite shape (At first, the inventory is a little confusing. The game seems to give you the option to use your kite, but since you are already a kite shape nothing happens. Only once you collect more shapes, the meaning of this becomes clear). Shape-shifting can help you reach places that you otherwise could not. So this is a really neat puzzle mechanic. It would have been even cooler if all citizens reacted differently depending on your shape! But given how much writing there already is, I totally understand that this was not achievable during TINS.

There is a bug with the inventory limit - you can run into a full inventory even though there seems to be space left, and the game can end up in an unfinishable state. It would be nice to see a fix for this.

The ending feels rushed and is kind of unsatisfactory. I'd really love to see a post-competition version with an expanded ending, or, dare I ask - multiple endings!

Overall: 5. The game is really playable and there is a lot of content to explore. It stays interesting for quite a long time. I'm docking half a point for the unsatisfactory ending. Luckily for you there are no half points and I'm rounding up.
Art: 4. Nicely drawn, everything is animated in tune with the music. The plug is well hidden and a cool discovery. I'm giving you 4/5 because I think the link to Escher is the weakest aspect of this submission.
Tech: 4. the Hexaking is a hexagon. There is a hexagonal square. The ending I was hoping for would have made a bigger deal out of the hexagon / Hexaking thing but it's still pretty good.
Genre: 5. The writing on this is really funny.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

I played through until the end! It's a short but nice experience. It's a bit hard to get into, but if you persist you find it's well worth the effort.

I think the idea for the game is very inspired. What I really love is that you managed to turn Escher-inspired impossible objects into a nice puzzle mechanic. You have to create a mental model of the 3D objects in order to predict where the ball will appear next to solve the puzzle.

The art style is nicely done with nice gradients and a nice lighting effect produced by the dot.

The game suffers a little because the first level is seemingly the hardest, because it seems impossible to turn the hexagon quickly enough to hit the two dots based purely on reaction time. Of course, since this is a puzzle game, it's actually not too hard once you think about it: just point your stream of arrows downwards, wait until you hit the first dot, and quickly turn a few degrees to the right to catch the second dot. But I think many players would miss that this is a test of thinking, not reaction times. I suggest swapping the first and second level, to put players on the right track and ease them in the concept of the game more gently.

Overall: 3. I was on the fence about this one. Given that the game is quite short, and the first level is a bit off-putting, I decided to reduce the score slightly from what it could have been.
Art: 5. I think this is one of the better applications of Escher I've seen in this competition. Overall the game has a stylish clean look.
Tech: 4. The hexagon is nicely drawn and ever present. The game code seems pretty solid.
Genre: 2. Not a very humorous game

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Qbitter is inspired by, and plays similar to Q-bert.

The game is nice, but too easy. It's far too easy to avoid enemies, and an arcade game like this needs to be challenging to stay interesting. Also, unlike Q-bert, it's impossible to jump off the field. I've played the post-compo version too, to see what it might have been, and that is definitely improved! But in this review I won't consider it.

This game is inspired by Escher, but also by Q-bert. In the README, you point out that Q-bert itself is also inspired by Escher. This is a neat little factoid, it's nice how it all comes together, so to speak. But Q-bert does it a little better: it has upside-down enemies that move as though gravity works different for them, just like in the Escher etch. I think you would have really killed it if enemies in Qbitter used the same inverted gravity idea, but perhaps it's hard to do that and keep it original.

What I would like to see is more variation in the levels! Sometimes, a block is inverted, which creates an interesting visual effect, but also makes you have to think more about how you navigate the screen. But these inverted blocks occur pretty rarely. As far as I'm concerned, you could easily add more. Or you could play with the shape of the field - does it always need to be a rectangle? Maybe the shape of the field can be a hexagon too!

Overall: 3. A very playable game, but the fun factor and replay value are diminished because it's little too easy
Art: 4. The relation to Escher is definitely there. Escher would have approved of the isometric style and the regular tiling. I like the choice of font, it makes the game look very stylish. You plug your own library in the credits.
Tech: 4. Hexagons are there in two ways: hexagons form the enemy, plus the isometric view of a cube also looks like a hexagon!
Genre: 3. You invoked the bonus rule here, so I'm ignoring the relative lack of humor and looked at the unit test code. I count about half a dozen tests spread over two modules. Not bad, for a game jam! But it's not exceptional either.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Wow, ItaJunior can draw! Already during the competition I was amazed by the sketches you posted in the logs. The pixel art is really well done. The gems sparkle, the water splashes, the protagonists hair swooshes.

Regretfully I can't really give this game very high marks. Even though it's pretty, it doesn't implement the special rules very well, and what's worse, it's not really that much fun to play.

So about the the fun factor. You have to shoot monkeys with a water pistol. The monkeys drop gems, when you collect four, you walk over to the hexagon and the game ends. It's really quite short. You don't have infinite ammo, instead you can reload your pistol in a puddle in the center. I understand that you had to add this to create some variation (otherwise you could just rampage around without consequences). But instead this just encourages you to camp in the puddle where you can reload.

Also, why four gems, and not six? It's a hexagon after all!

Overall: 3. The game is pretty, but not fun for very long.
Art: 3. I'm giving you extra points here because the pixel art is so well done, but you really didn't implement the rules.
Tech: 2. There is a hexagon in the game. But the game would not have been different if it was a triangle.
Genre: 2. I suppose the concepts of washing monkeys with a water pistol is a little funny, but it's not much.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Meet DJ Escher! DJ Escher jockeys hexagons instead of discs. He throws them around like Wart throws bubbles. But unlike Mario, you should try to catch these projectiles. Which isn't easy and isn't hard. No matter what you do, catching discs is pretty much random. Sometimes you luck out, catch all hexagons... and then nothing happens.

I understand from the logs that you actually didn't have much time during TINS, so kudos for submitting something anyway.

Overall: 1. You can play the game or not, it doesn't really matter :)
Art: 3. I like the stylish color scheme. And there is a plug for dosowisko.net
Tech: 2. Yup, hexagons.
Genre: 2. Escher is there sporting cool shades. That, and the music, makes it somewhat funny.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

The game humorously pretends to be a mobile game, it starts with a mock conversation in a chat app, after which you open the game itself on this simulated phone. There is even an in-game ad, a hidden plug for another game by the author. Or at least it seems so, when you click on the ad, some text scrolls by that is too tiny and moves too fast to read properly. The 'report this ad' link is a clever touch, but it doesn't seem to do anything different, a missed opportunity IMHO.

As for the game itself: Moving around in the 3D world seems glitchy. There seem to be a lot of hidden areas that are accessible via stairs and high walkways between rooms. There are mysterious pipes connecting areas. I almost feel like curling up in a morph ball and rolling around through these pipes. But I haven't discovered this morph ball ability in this game, so that's just wishful thinking.
I took the stairs and ended up stuck in an area surrounded by a pipe, it was too high to jump over, so the only thing I could do was close the game.
There are only two levels. Your goal is to find a red flag and not get stuck, and not fall in lava either. Lava is just a red floor, when you touch it the levels starts over. You are literally surrounded with Escher's artworks, they form an infinite box around you.

Overall: 2. Two levels with not much to do in them do not capture the attention for very long.
Art: 2. The Escher artwork feels tacked on.
Tech: 2. Hexagon is there in the most minimalistic way possible. I also have to dock points for late-submitted source code.
Genre: 3. I like the presentation of the game as embedded in a simulation of a mobile phone, and using an ad for the plug.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 3