Category: Reviews

A Small Favor. A point-and-click adventure that I found particularly engaging. My mileage varies a lot with these kinds of games: sometimes I like them a lot, sometimes the frustration level is just too high for me to tolerate. But this one worked for me pretty well. I only had to look at a hint for one thing, and in retrospect it was a completely fair puzzle that I was just failing to think through right. It is as far as I can tell impossible to make unwinnable.

Minim. It’s a set of 35 mathematical and spatial puzzles, very simple but elegantly presented. No story or anything here, but I liked this one a lot — though I think the game isn’t very well laid-out in terms of escalating difficulty, because I got really stuck for a long time on one of the middle levels and then found the rest of them pretty easy. Maybe I’m unusual, though — to judge by the JIG comments, other people had problems with other puzzles in the list.

Spirited Heart. By the author of Heileen and co-author of Summer Session, Spirited Heart bills itself as a “fantasy life sim”, sort of similar to Kudos but with demons and elves and magic. The aesthetic style will, I’m sure, immediately select for a limited audience — my eyebrows kind of went up at their own accord at the sight of the demoness character with her gown cut down to her navel and little decorative bat-wings, who nonetheless has an adorable schoolgirlish face. It’s that sort of thing. Beyond that, though, it’s reasonably smooth and well-constructed in its genre, but there aren’t enough options to make for very diverse and interesting gameplay, and it’s possible to run into a lot of random bad luck that keeps you from getting anywhere. Story elements drop into the game at random if you’re hanging out in the right places; and while this is better than having no story at all, it’s still too arbitrary to make for a compelling narrative.

I’ve also started Braid, now that it is (hooray!) available for the Mac. It is really clever, but even with the ability to rewind time, I suck at platformers. We’ll see how this goes.

On the time-management game Kate’s Fix-it-up Adventure.

Recent playing:

Now Boarding 1.2. This game has been out for a while, but it’s just received a new expansion covering Caribbean airports — a free upgrade for people who have older versions of the game. Now Boarding is an airport game, which makes it perhaps very superficially resemble, say, Airport Mania.

Fortunately it’s considerably more inventive than that. What I really like about Now Boarding is the way that gameplay evolves. It starts off as a time-management kind of deal, with the player responsible for putting individual passengers on planes, dragging planes to the gate, and doing hands-on customer service. Gradually, though, it becomes more like a tycoon game. You get to hire employees to do the menial customer-management tasks while you yourself take a more high-level view and devote yourself primarily to laying out routes and upgrading your terminals and fleet. Towards the end of the game, you may find that instead of repeatedly creating custom routes for all your planes, you are instead optimizing a set of repeatable loops for the different planes in your fleet. Congratulations: you’ve ceased to be a charter company and turned into a regular scheduled carrier.

Continue reading “Non-IF Roundup”

On Jojo’s Fashion Show 2. On the subject of which, is Gamelab really gone/completely repurposed? When I wrote this article a few weeks ago, their website was still up and running, but now — as the editorial note points out — it is completely given over to Gamestar Mechanic and there’s no sign of their other work history.

If so, I’m really sorry to see it. They were doing some of the most innovative work in the casual game market.