I kind of have a hard time giving this an honest review because like, although I did play it, and translated too... I still had no idea what's going on. Like I get the gist of the story, three people go missing on an island, I get it. What I DON'T get is how to play the actual block puzzle game.
I'm not sure if this exact type of block falling game is a clone of some other really popular puzzle game I've never played, and that's why it wasn't explained, but I couldn't figure out how to play it like, at all. Am I supposed to click the blocks? Click near the blocks? Drag my cursor into the blocks? And what's the goal? At first I thought it was getting the falling blocks to hit the blocks on the bottom of the same color. But it was really hard to get that to line up properly with how slow things fell. Then I accidentally made two falling blocks touch, and they lit up, and exploded into points when they hit the bottom. But there was also another time where something similar happened and when the blocks hit the bottom... nothing happened. I literally couldn't figure out what my goal was or how I was supposed to achieve it, and it didn't help that you can get a game over so quickly when you start a level if you don't make the right move from the very start, and then you have to watch that drawn out scene of her fading in every time you die, and so trying to experiment with different ways to play is punishing. I mean, hell. It was only once I got to day(?) 3 that I realized that there's that bar at the bottom of the screen that slowly depletes if you don't get enough points before it runs out. -- And all of that could've been remedied if they had just told you how the game works in-game. I know there's a readme in the files but mine was all jumbled up and the link inside it is broken.
I will mention though, I had the file explorer open behind the game window so I was watching the new ones appear as things happened. I definitely found that very cool.
Now, after playing all the way through to the end, I went on YouTube and I watched an explanation video. And I can safely say that, yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to figure out how to play on my own. The story is pretty simple, although a bit underwhelming, yet I'm sure that's due to me coming into the game with experience in meta games that came after it, so it's not a fair judgement. I agree with the sentiment that it was a pioneer of the genre. I'm also sure it's a much more fun game if you go into it already knowing how to play the falling block game. I swear, if they released a version of this and everything was the same except it was a Suika clone instead of this block puzzle, I'd have a blast with it. But since I spent so much brain power just trying to figure out how to play, it was harder for me to absorb the substance of what I was playing.
I'm not sure if this exact type of block falling game is a clone of some other really popular puzzle game I've never played, and that's why it wasn't explained, but I couldn't figure out how to play it like, at all. Am I supposed to click the blocks? Click near the blocks? Drag my cursor into the blocks? And what's the goal? At first I thought it was getting the falling blocks to hit the blocks on the bottom of the same color. But it was really hard to get that to line up properly with how slow things fell. Then I accidentally made two falling blocks touch, and they lit up, and exploded into points when they hit the bottom. But there was also another time where something similar happened and when the blocks hit the bottom... nothing happened. I literally couldn't figure out what my goal was or how I was supposed to achieve it, and it didn't help that you can get a game over so quickly when you start a level if you don't make the right move from the very start, and then you have to watch that drawn out scene of her fading in every time you die, and so trying to experiment with different ways to play is punishing. I mean, hell. It was only once I got to day(?) 3 that I realized that there's that bar at the bottom of the screen that slowly depletes if you don't get enough points before it runs out. -- And all of that could've been remedied if they had just told you how the game works in-game. I know there's a readme in the files but mine was all jumbled up and the link inside it is broken.
I will mention though, I had the file explorer open behind the game window so I was watching the new ones appear as things happened. I definitely found that very cool.
Now, after playing all the way through to the end, I went on YouTube and I watched an explanation video. And I can safely say that, yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to figure out how to play on my own. The story is pretty simple, although a bit underwhelming, yet I'm sure that's due to me coming into the game with experience in meta games that came after it, so it's not a fair judgement. I agree with the sentiment that it was a pioneer of the genre. I'm also sure it's a much more fun game if you go into it already knowing how to play the falling block game. I swear, if they released a version of this and everything was the same except it was a Suika clone instead of this block puzzle, I'd have a blast with it. But since I spent so much brain power just trying to figure out how to play, it was harder for me to absorb the substance of what I was playing.