Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

In this wholly original Fable, a skunk and an elephant join forces to look for a magical flower. You manipulate both animals in an isometric world full of physics puzzles and scripted dialogs.

This game reminds me a bit of those old Microcomputer era 3D isometric games, such as "Solstice" or "Head over Heels" (the latter in particular because in that game you also control two player characters). I never actually finished either of those games, because they are frustratingly difficult, requiring precise jumps and block manipulation in a rather primitive physics simulation.

The same frustration unfortunately transfers over to this entry.

For example, in one screen you have to manipulate planks to create a bridge for the elephant to cross. If if you let the skunk accidentally touch the area's edge before the bridge is complete, the elephant storms towards you with the battle cry "Coming!" running straight into the pit that you hadn't finished covering with planks. The skunk and the elephant often get in each others way on the narrow boardwalks. Because the elephant always tries to follow you into the next room, even if that isn't actually possible, the skunk can't explore ahead on its own.

I think it's great that the game is based on a completely novel Fable. I know ChatGPT helped out, I still think it's original and creative. I'm going to give 5 points for the genre.

The pre-rendered graphics in classic Elias-style are effective, the Elephant looks great with its great floppy ears. The iridescent bubbles that you encounter are not very special, but they tick the box. The comic bubbles are used throughout, and I can only admire the capabilities of the scripting system, which is able to effectively convey the story. 4 Points for art.

The map screen gives you a very detailed, view of the world that you have explored. It also has charts that show in excruciating detail how poorly you are progressing. 4 Points for tech.

All in all a cool and ambitious game with a very advanced physics engine, that unfortunately proves to be a little frustrating in practice. 3 points overall.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by sanderovich all reviews by sanderovich

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by Jellepostma all reviews by Jellepostma

A cute game offering an AI take on a fable. The world it presents is full of small puzzles you need to solve together with your elephant companion. However, the game can be quite frustrating to play at some times, since precisely controlling both your character and the elephant can be a tough feat to accomplish, however interesting of an additional game mechanic it may be. The elephant rushes around the level trying to follow you, jumping to its demise even though you did not intent it so. At some point, you need to move planks in order for the elephant to make in through the room, which proves a difficult task since these planks are so easily moved by accident. It does not help either that the jump and pull action are bound to the same key and one cannot jump while standing still, and also not pull while moving. This makes it very difficult to move said planks in the right position.

Despite its flaws, the game's atmosphere is great. It has a nice visual style, great enchanting music and a nice world (and graphs!). The genre requirement has been fulfilled with the help of some AI magic, and I can give a wink to the "iridescent" style of the bubbles floating around (as pointed out by the elephant in the room). Overall, it was a frustratingly enjoyable experience and very impressively executed considering the time limit. Kudos!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 4

Review by awergh all reviews by awergh

Genre (Fable)
=============
The fable here was: The rabbits and the elephants\the skunk and the elephant

My impression that this is a direct implementation of the fable by the skunk and the elephant working together to progress through the game.

As the game is entirely based on this premise, I would describe it as critical to the gameplay.

Technical (Overall and use of chart)
====================================
The game included a map as well as a fun chart of deaths. I found that the map was very useful to figure out how you had progressed through the game.

The deaths were not necessarily useful but it was a fun little detail to see how you were progressing through the game.

Artistical (Generally and Iridescence)
======================================

The game featured iridescent bubbles that look cool but don’t seem to do anything in regards to the actual game play.

The game has an isometric perspective which is something I very much like.

The speech balloons are used for dialog communicating with other characters in the game. I think this was a good implementation of this rule within the game.

Conclusion
==========
I found this game fairly impressive; this is partly because I particularly like games that use an isometric perspective.

I thought it was a good implementation of a fable (using chatgpt to help you make something for this still counts as a proper fable I think).

Given the size of the game I thought the map was a good way of making a useful chart that fit within the game.

In general though I didn't try to finish it and while I mostly enjoyed what I played; it could be a little bit frustrating. The biggest drawback was that the elephant had a tendency to get itself killed if you didn't babysit it through the room. The controls also felt a bit clunky at times, not quite sure how to fix this as I haven't succeeded at building an isometric game like this.

I liked the implementation of the fable and thought it provided a compelling story to progress through the game. I do think it could need a bit more work (doesn't everything) but thought it was a solid entry.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by victorwss all reviews by victorwss

Interesting idea, but needs some work. As the author acknowledge, its game engine is very buggy, and its buggyness interferes with gameplay.

The characters are animals, for sure. And there is a fable about reaching a flower, but to be sincere, I didn't understood it nor could complete the game.

For iridisence, well, I didn't really noticed it. I don't know if the game "dustiness" had the intent of being "iridiscent", but if it was, it didn't work very well. There are some supposedly iridiscence falling stuff, but they aren't any useful or meaningful to the game at all, and their dustiness (as everything is dusty) don't let me appreciate their iridiscence.

The speech balloons were well implemented and are useful for storytelling, so this was implemented very correctly into the game.

It claims to be a 2-player game with one player controlling the skunk and the other the elephant. But this isn't true. It is just a 1-player game where you occasionally have to control 2 characters. Claiming that this is a 2-player game would be the same as claiming that "The Lost Vikings" were a 3-player game or that "Lemmings" was a MMO game, simply no.

There is a chart in the map page, but it isn't very useful and is perfectly dispensable.

The code is significantly complex. And needs some work to nail down the bugs, including sequence-breaking bugs. Unfortunately, there are many bugs that may screw up the gaming experience. Also, I suspected that I softlocked the game at least once, but I have no idea how.

The game controls are awful, and difficult to learn to use correctly. Also, they are very easy to screw up. Falling off the screen instead of navigating between rooms is common. Misjumping into the void due to bad timing into hitting buttons is also easy. Pushing or pulling stuff when you wanted to jump or vice-versa may also screw up things. Those bugs, specially the ones about moving characters, are very frustrating and this isn't intended as part of the game experience.

The game can be fun and challenging. Many other games were either too boring or too short, but this is not the case here. There are many rooms to explore and many puzzles to solve.

My suggestions are:

* Make the controls easier.

* Remove the dustiness.

* Fix the bugs.

* Make the map larger, with randomly generatd parts or different levels.

And with those changes, it would be a very nice game.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by KillerWasp all reviews by KillerWasp

It has too many errors, to such an extent that in the end I got stuck with an elephant that fell into the void. If only he could fly.

The whole visual interface like menu, charts and bubble texts is too simple, only just practice. The only iridescent thing is the bubbles, which is barely noticeable.

The style of the game is interesting, the characters with animations, the handling of objects and collisions as well. This part makes the game pretty good.
The events and limitations on the place fail too much, I advise limiting the space where you travel and if you leave the space in the place then the change must be instantaneous.
It's very annoying when you have to adapt to the area and activate the yellow section event along the way.

Instead of 2 buttons (jump and pull) on the keyboard you did it with 1 button, I suppose it's to simulate the old 1-button joystick, although I'm not sure.

I have not seen any magic flower. :(

I could only see a short and simple story with the elephant, a goblin, and a... human? Does count like fable a human in human form and who speaks? Then the elephant seems to follow me on every part of the map until I get stuck. I can't say anything about his history.

The events along with the narrations work well, I have seen that the balloon keeps pointing to the characters and they reset if you die or exit.

The graphics and the map keep a style reminiscent of the old mac and win3.1. Like the mechanics of the game it reminds me of many others. The game is well done, and I advise continuing it to complete it and clean up all the bugs. It gives to make games like this with multiple stories, or completing the map to eliminate gaps, or completing the map with scroll, it gives to create various modalities and styles of games.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by Yubi all reviews by Yubi

The Magical Flower is as beautiful as it is frustrating. It is beautifully frustrating!

It frustrates by design in the endearingly clumsy character of the elephant, whose greater size and power easily displaces the skunk into the abyss at the slightest lapse of attention, and whose adorably naive faith in the skunk's leadership often sends him plummeting after.

It unfortunately also frustrates for a less charming reason: the game's controls handle like an elephant has taken the wheel.

The game's keyboard controls are mostly to blame. Although the options to remap the keys don't actually work, this makes little difference when the push/pull and jump commands are tied to the same key. When the skunk is moving, the action key causes it to jump. When it skunk is not moving, the action key causes it to push or pull. Simple enough, until you discover that the skunk can never take standing jumps in place to help gauge the the width of gaps. Conversely, precise arrangements of plank bridges are constantly being disordered by accidental jumping at the worst moments, consigning them (and the hapless skunk) to sky-blue oblivion.

Speaking of the bridges, I've run into a bug on two separate maps where the fallen planks despawn and will not return even if I force-restart the level or the entire application. Mercifully, I was able to counter this with a combination of other bugs, including:
-abusing skunk's uncanny ability to carry the elephant on its own back and access staircase boardwalks that the elephant is not meant to be able to reach
-the skunk's ability to pull boulders that are supposedly too heavy to be pushed
-apparent default exits that the game sets the characters' position to upon a forced level reset, which allow me to skip past the map's puzzles if I approached from the wrong side

Although I managed to win without cheating on a second run, my greatest obstacle turned out to be the skunk's inability to move while lifting the planks, making the function essentially useless. Being able to properly position the planks would have been an enormous quality-of-life improvement, given that both the skunk and elephant will kick planks into the pit if they are even slightly too high or low. If two planks fall on top of each other in an particularly unfortunate configuration (e.g. their ends overlap), the level can become unwinnable as easily as that.

With those control complaints out of the way, it's onto the handling of this competition's rules. But first, I want to praise the background tracks: their varied moods complement the game's atmosphere well. Where did you find such enchanting pieces?

Fable:
You've made excellent use of the animal fables rule not only by building an entire game around an original AI-written story, but one where the physical differences between the elephant and skunk are juxtaposed to hilarious effect. I found the elephant's constant complaining about being bumped into and stepped over funny, then wearisome, then funny once more. They skunk simply can't help but bump into the elephant, and the elephant can't help but bump into the skunk, to disastrous effect given the world's narrow configurations. There are probably several morals that can be taken from that interaction alone, but they'll have to speak for themselves.

Dialogue:
The dialogue bubbles fit the game's aesthetic well, and much is expressed with literally few words. The over-large, terse, all-lower case font was a great design choice that contrasted the elephant's innocent nature with its inadvertently destructive potential. I could never stay angry at the elephant no matter how many of my painstakingly constructed bridges he wrecks.

I initially wished that the skunk were similarly well characterized, being the "I" of the game. Perhaps the player is meant to project themselves onto his speechless character? In which case, it is well that the skunk has nothing to say, for the dialogue bubbles I would emit would be unpublishable here.

Iridescence:
The iridescent bubbles felt a bit flat and un-bubblelike, but I don't have anything against them since they were not central to the gameplay or story. Their flatness though, did sometimes bring to attention just how confused my sense of space and perspective could be in some of the isometric maps - the map on second column on the bottom grid row is a prime example. I guess it is difficult to design a perfect map that is neither truly two or three dimensional.

Graphs:
This game had three separate graphs! The world grid would have been a sufficient chart already, especially as the story refers to it as a chart directly. I'm not sure why the measurement of completion percentage had to be in bars when it could have just been a progress bar. I'm also not sure how I feel about the deaths-per-minute graph, even though it's good for a laugh if I make time to pay attention to it. I think a graph that displayed how many times I died in each particular map would have been far more interesting.

Speaking of the world grid, was there supposed to be a hint somewhere leading to the final story piece after encountering the gnomes on the main path? It felt like I discovered it accidentally only after much aimless wandering.

Co-op(tional):
A game about cooperation with yourself. Ah, the humility... I did have a partner assist me with the aforementioned elephant-carrying bug, but it really is a single-player game.

Well, in parting... the Magical Flower was by far the longest TINS 2023 entry I've played. I felt good when I finished it, but I can't say I felt good throughout. I struggled with the controls more than I struggled with the game's offered challenges. I think the maps I enjoyed most in retrospect were not the bridge-building and gap-jumping zones, but the straightforward paths and crossroads that gave me time to breathe and take in the journey of the elephant and skunk through the frustratingly beautiful maze.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical None Technical None Genre None