Eliss

This is a very pretty game, sort of like a mashup of Katamari Damancy and Asteroids. It's really well designed and the music is nice.

The Instructions only really make sense once you've played the game, which is a little bit bonkers, but it's nice that the game includes instructions.

It was interesting to play a game that really demanded the use of multiple-touch (for both splitting the stars and holding them in place on levels with black holes). Fairly effective, although I did find that my fingers were frustratingly obfuscating the screen pretty often. That's not an issue I'm going to let slide here when critiquing touchscreen games. It's an inherent problem for the platform and one that must be addressed.

The context-sensitive controls added to my frustration. Because there's really only one action the player can perform (touching something on the screen), that action gets used for every function in the game. Moving a star? Touch it and drag it to where you want it. Moving two stars? Touch them and drag. Picking up star dust? Touch. Splitting stars? Touch it in two places and drag. This intense overlap in the controls results in lots of situations where, for example, one drags a star into another star when one was trying to pick up stardust, splitting stars instead of moving them or combining stars inadvertently.

For a game that is arcade-oriented like this, this seems like a big deficiency. It's possible that with more training I would get better at playing this game, and there certainly are people who are into this kind of "gaming as athleticism," but then the obfuscation of the screen seems to become an even bigger issue. I understand how some people are good at hard games and I'm really, really impressed. But I can't imagine that fans of, say, Ikaruga would be okay with having to actually hold the controller between their eyes and the screen while they play. If this is an "old school" hard, athletic sort of game, then doesn't the control scheme basically fail on that front?

On top of all that, the difficulty progression seems too steep to me. The designer clearly wanted to have each level offer something new or, at least, newish. For me, personally, this instilled a feeling of despair each time I finished a level. That's probably a personal thing and, as I've said, there are people who enjoy that kind of gaming.

Basically, I think Eliss is a potentially enjoyable game. It's a rather limited arcade-style game that is fundamentally well made but which is hampered by deep frustrations and general anxiety, so I'm not really inclined to play it. I'm not going to fault folks who like to play this game, I'm just baffled about the concessions they're making in doing so.

I played Eliss up to level eight before writing this review.

(This post wasn't particularly shorter, really. Sorry about that. I'll keep working on the length.)