Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie (Playstation)

 It feels bad to have to give a negative review to what is obviously a good game, but that's what I'm going to have to do here. There's so much about Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie that's really high quality, a lot of cool and interesting ideas executed well, but the problem is that I just really don't enjoy playing it at all. It starts off at a disadvantage, being an adventure game, a genre I rarely get along with well.

 

In its favour, though, it's not an adventure game of the "completely illogical object puzzle" type. Instead, all the puzzles centre around a device called the LogLock, which is made up of a bunch of wheels that have the alphabet printed on them. The wheels can be manipulated in various ways: thhat can be swapped around, the letters can be flipped and rotated, and so on. Each puzzle tasks you with changing one word into another, utilising a certain number of moves or fewer. For some reason, the tutorial puzzles the game starts you off with are much stricter regarding move limits than the puzzles you'll tackle in the story, to the point that I came pretty close to just quitting at that point.
 

When you actually get into the story itself (which I think takes place in your dream?), then not only do the puzzles get easier, but they lose a bit of their abstraction, too. For when you solve a puzzle in the story, you're not just changing one word to another, but doing the same to actual objects! For eample, the first two puzzles you encounter have you turning a cage into a bell, so that the boy trapped inside can escape from it, and then a cow into a cat, so that it's no longer blocking your path. So that element does at least make things a lot more satisfying and entertaining than just solving abstract wor puzzles in isolation.

 

Most of the game, though, has you controlling a little girl as she runs around what appears to be a mediterranean island, getting into mischief, magically transforming objects, and so on. Though the game doesn't appear to have any horror elements, the easiest comparision to make is to Resident Evil, since you're moving a polygon character around various pre-rendered backgrounds with different camera angles, and it's often obvious what you can interact with, since it too will be a polygon object. 

 

I can only make vague guesses as to what the plot's actually about, because it is of course, all in Japanese. But there is a really cool presentational quirk to it: there's no voice acting! Instead, characters will gesticulate as if they're talking, while musical sounds will play, conveying the mood of what they're saying, with subtitles in Japanese appearing onscreen at the same time. This is a cool and imaginitive touch, and really adds a lot to the whole "high quality animated movie" feel of the game.

 

Unfortunately, though, like I said at the start of the review, I didn't like this game at all. I got bored wandering around the island looking for the next puzzle to solve, and actually solving the puzzles wasn't satisfying enough for me to make up for how boring and/or frustrating they could get. But also like I said up at the top, this is clearly a very high quality game, and if you are a fan of adventure games and fixed puzzles, I feel confident in saying it's definitely worth your time and attention.

Adventures in the Desert Country ~Al and the Underground Labyrinth~ (PC)

 It's nice to see a game that's a clear labour of love from its developer, and Adventures in the Desert Country ~Al and the Underground Labyrinth~ (which is the title according to Google Translate, but it reads decently enough to me) is definitely such a game. As far as I can tell, it's an original setting and characters, with all original graphics and sound, and made and designed completely from scratch. It is, in terms of production values, easily up to the standards of the average indie/doujin 2D platformer, and it's free! Amazing.

 

Is it actually any good, though? Yes! But with a caveat or two. Before I get into that, I should probably descibe how it plays, though. It's a very old-fashioned, nineties-style platformer, in which you play as the eponymous Al (Albert Lal Custard, to give him his full name) as he traverses the also eponymous underground labyrinth. In the labyrinth, there's lots of enemies who want him dead, and who can be fought off either with swordplay, or by shooting fireballs at them. An even bigger threat than the enemies, though, are the many, many bottomless pits littered throughout each stage. And of course, the two are capable of working together, too, with enemies often being strategically placed so that they've got a decent chance of knocking you to your doom.

 

One nice little touch is that that goes both ways, though: you can also knock enemies off of platforms to their doom, too. And not just in the bottomless pits, either: enemies are affected by all the traps in the stages. Spike pits, lava pits, falling blocks, and so on can all be used to your advantage if you're smart. And that's where the aforementioned caveat comes in: this game is really difficult. Not in the way of the masocore platformers that were popular about fifteen years ago, but in a normal, old-fashioned "make no mistakes" way. If the stage select in the options screen is to be believed, there are eight stages in the game, and I've gotten as far as the sixth. To get past the third you really need to start playing carefully, getting the lay of the land, and so on.

 

It's not a Rick Dangerous-type situation, where you need to memorise the entire stage layout, because the hazards are impossible to react to without foreknowledge, you just have to play smart, assess the situation, and form a plan. The enemies and the stage are both against you, so to progress, you'll usually have to figure out how you're going to kill the enemies with the tools you have, and how you're going to traverse the stage (which obviously becomes somewhat easier when the enemies aren't in it). So though the game's short, and the stages themselves aren't very long in terms of how much actual distance you cover in each of them, this is still a game that'll take a while to get through, because of the methodical way it needs to be played. I'm sure a skilled speedrun of it would be an exciting watch!

 

As I already said, this game is a clear labour of love, and if you're interested in playing a platform game that demands a lot of strategy and skill, you should definitely give it a try. It's the exact level of difficulty where every bit of progress is a satisfying accomplishment, and you'll keep playing past the point of frustration so as to not let the game beat you. I've had it a while now, so I have absolutely no memory of how I originally discovered it, but you can get it here.