518th played so far
Genre: Puzzle
Platform: PC/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Klei Entertainment
For some reason I keep thinking of this game as something more actionny – maybe something more Angry Birds-like, or Tetris-style catch/move items that are falling.
It isn’t though, and on some level I know that – the game is more comparable to The Incredible Machine, a series I remember loving when I was younger. The hope is that it pays off here.
Our Thoughts
Eets, first of all, does what it does competently. You place objects around a field to move your character to the puzzle piece, your goal in each area. Eets walks on his own, and his behaviour depends on his mood – if he’s scared, he won’t walk off platforms, while when angry he’ll jump across gaps. Items change this – either through feeding him at points in his path or through side effects from other items.
It’s mostly a nice systematic addition to a formula that, aside from the aforementioned Incredible Machine, I don’t recall seeing that often. A lot of it beyond the moods comes down to careful item placement, often bouncing Eets around the area, while putting in some rapid clicking to make some of the action work.
One thing that lets the game here down, though, is the precision of the placement. Quite often, it’s not just about finding out where to place an item, but to place it with closer to pixel precision to get it just right. It feels unpredictable at times, requiring loads of tries (often slow when the chain of events gets longer) and getting annoying when it doesn’t quite work.
Graphics, in the mean time, are nice, colourful and surreal to fit the weird nature of the world. It adds a lot of flavour, making it clear how it goes on (except for the bits where it wasn’t quite as easy to get them accurately).
Final Thoughts
The game looks good and has some pretty good puzzles going on, set up in a nice progression. Unfortunately, some suffer too much of having to use guesswork and unclear physics, rather than it feeling like skill – there are some places where it felt a bit too much coming down to too precise placement, while the rest of the game feels like it should be more fun, rather than being quite this tough (and this tough this early on). I’ll still play more of it later.