Review #3 - Blustery Earth | 4/5

Review by charismatic on Tuesday, August 14th 2012

According to parallel's profile info, he's notredame. I've played a few of notredames's games, and I know that he's a skilled game maker. Are my expectations high? Yes they are.

I like the way this game is designed. The outside of it is roomy and almost has an exploration feel to it even though there isn't much to do, yet the cave is small and full of pathways. Sounds like an interesting setup to me! Hopefully he's done it well.

First I'll talk about the outside part of the game. You get all of your health taken away at the beginning, so you'll have to be careful until you can reach a health pack. I won't ruin the puzzles and traps, but I'll tell you this: Choose your paths wisely and pay attention to the areas around you. Even if you're very careful you'll most likely fail on your first try, but there's nothing wrong with a little trial and error! I definitely like the way he sets up this part of the game, although there is actually a way to skip most of it... (no telling ;D)

Once you get to the cave, its different. Its more cramped, but that doesn't mean its less interesting. You do a lot of backtracking and some of the traps and obstacles are set up quite well. Everything is actually fairly easy... until you get to what I like to call "The Room". Sweet mother of holy halos this part is hard. Its the giant room that has bouncers everywhere scattered with ninjas. Honestly, this place was most likely done very sloppily and its one of the parts I really don't like. This part will destroy you over and over again unless you really are a pro. You'll be trying to get to the other side of the room, when you get trapped in between four ninjas bouncing all over the place and get taken out by a sea of ninja stars. Or sometimes the bouncers will push you to the top of the room and you won't be able to get down because they keep bouncing you up. Sound frustrating? You have no idea until you've actually played it.

I'm not going to go in-depth with all of the obstacles and traps in this game, but I'll talk about a few. They include going through hallways of ninjas to get power-gloves which you use to hit switches they unlock pathways to a maze of crushers that leads to a sea of hotblocks and so on. All of the obstacles are pretty good. I have one complain though: getting trapped. Yes, I know you need some kind of "punishment" for falling into a trap or failing an obstacle, but really. Once you get far into the game only to fall into a pit of hotblocks because you didn't jump far enough will make you want to pull your hair out. If parallel were to come back to make changes to this game, I'd suggest the punishment to failing the traps that come later in the game should just be redoing them. This is a tip for all the readers too, if you make a long game that's as hard as this one, try not to make parts where the player can just get stuck really far into the game.

Overall, the parts I liked ruled out the parts I didn't. A fine game.