There's a thin line between solving a puzzle and completing a chore, and you can easily sense when a game has taken a step over it. The primary pleasure of a puzzle comes in piecing together the solution, in plotting your escape from each convoluted trap the designers have strung up around you. Carrying the plan out is a secondary problem, and the best games in the genre - like
Portal - make that part fast and constantly mix and re-mix the arrangement of your shots, pushes, jumps or pulls.
Tiny Brains is a game about pushing, pulling, jumping on and switching places with a small selection of objects. In rearranging those mechanisms, and splitting them between four twisted lab creatures looking for an exit from the skewed venue of science that created them, the game gives us our physical puzzles (and the occasional chore).
The tiny, titular noggins belong to Dax, the miniature bat, Stew the rabbit, a mouse named Pad, and Minsc, the blue hamster that, in some
alternate universe somewhere, probably has an owner named Boo. Those are their names, but you'll probably call them by their color-coded telekinetic abilities: Push-Bat, Pull-Rabbit, Swap-Rat and Block-Hamster (he can summon a block of ice). Together they must escape an eccentric scientist's clutches, as you look from above and see them scurrying about in a cute, sectioned maze built out of tubes, wires, corrugated cardboard and popsicle sticks. You can either play by yourself, switching through the super-powered vermin with the shoulder buttons, or have three more players join you on couch or online.
Continue reading Tiny Brains review: Frankenstein's furballs
Tiny Brains review: Frankenstein's furballs originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |
Email this |
Comments