This was the day where I was going to take a break but the next game is so easy to comment on that I'm just going to plug ahead.Mouse About is a typical sort of puzzle game, basically like Boxxle with no walls. (Hey, Boxxle is what I think of, you can insert the name of whatever block-moving puzzle game that rings your bell. Cool?) This implementation of the game is pretty good, even on the Touch. The game itself is so simple (at any moment you can only choose one of four directions to move the mouse) that the controls can be similarly simple (touch the screen and move your finger in the direction you want the mouse to move). This is good and, surprisingly, I already find it a refreshing change.
On the other hand, the actual gameplay concept here seems completely broken. This is a puzzle game with timer. That's annoying but not fatal. Unfortunately, if you fail to complete the level before the time runs out, the game gives you a new puzzle to solve. This is good in the sense that the player won't get stuck on a single puzzle that is (perhaps only for them) unsolvable, but it's bad in that you don't get to finish the puzzle.
I hate that.
The gameplay made me feel like someone kept yanking away the book I was reading and jamming a new one in my hands in its place. Yeah, it's possible there are people who might actually like this concept (probably Apple fans in general -- "It's a feature!"), but I am not one of those people.
To sum up, this is a well made game designed for fans of speed dating.
I don't know how much of the game I played because it's got ADHD and doesn't keep track of insignificant details like that.
Agreed about the interface being nice, I think that the way you can "stack" commands for the mouse is very satisfying, meaning you don't have to wait for your stupid mouse man to do his thing, you can just issue your commands and wait for him to die.
ReplyDeleteNotable for this game and numerous others — the frequency of success events — for every failure, you've earned 25 successes. Doodle Jump is the same way, it's like it's designed for people who need constant validation.
My theory why they pull the levels away from you once you fail: the levels, at least at first, are surprisingly limited in the ways you can fail. There aren't more than two logical branching paths for a while, so if you failed, you'd get it right next time virtually by default.
Interesting idea: what if we included a rewind button, a la Braid? Wherein would be the harm? (that is, we can remove all failure events, entirely, forever! Everyone is a gold star winner.)
Also, mouse about is god forbiddenly slow to load. WHY?
That's an interesting observation about the "success events," not something I was thinking about while playing the game.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'll accept that explanation for not allowing the player to retry levels. Even still, I'd like to see some way to give the player a feeling of control over their progress in the game. As things are, it's just "level, level, level, now you're in water, level, level, whoops, different level, blarg!" That's sort of lame.
Putting in some sort of rewind feature would be a big step in the right direction. I imagine that with so few moves involved in each level, this wouldn't be a monumental task, either.