I’ve never been one for puzzle games. I don’t have the kind of brain that can mentally untangle a problem, then crack it using a few considered manoeuvres. If I don’t grasp a puzzle after a bit of random clicking I tend to start bellowing like a tormented farm animal before stumbling off to cool my head in a bucket of ice water. However, I played indie puzzler Vizati to the end (of the story mode anyway), battling headaches, blackouts and increasingly heavy nosebleeds. I wonder why I persevered? Let’s investigate, why not.
Vizati’s a match-three variation in which you manipulate a square grid containing several coloured Vizati stones. Turn, flip or shunt the grid to cause the stones to fall next to each other. When three or more of the same colour align, they disappear. It’s a solid enough concept salted with that satisfying ‘tidying up’ component.
The game has two modes, arcade and story. Dabbling with the former for a while saw me blast through without really understanding how. It requires matching up combinations of coloured stones, freeing space as more gradually appear and threaten to fill the grid. My intelli-brain soon switched to stand-by however as arbitrarily flicking the thing about was enough to see me through.
The mouse control is a bit fiddly. Keyboard and gamepad work fine but without the sparkly visual effects.
On to the story which offers a more elegant variation of the Vizati stone puzzle. And, you know, a story. In a puzzle game.
This time there’s a set number of stones which need disappearing and a limit to the number of actions you can perform to make this happen; thus the right combination of rotations, left or right shunts and flips need to be figured out to cascade the blocks into level-beating proximity.
The puzzle itself is set on a painterly, water-coloured background depicting an autumnal landscape. Characters appear, see the weird spinning puzzle grid in the sky and wonder what the hell it is. This interested me. The animation and slightly ‘off’ dialogue develops an atmosphere like that of the early morning foreign cartoons I’d occasional discover on TV as a child; the sort that fascinate while freaking you the hell out.
“Sophia and Ugene ponder their joint hallucination prior to the biggest drug-induced meltdown of their lives”
I didn’t really keep playing Vizati because I found the puzzles particularly compulsive, I kept playing because I wanted to see how developers DifferentPixel were going to end the story. How would they explain this rotating sky block the characters are perplexed by throughout? The answer is, disappointingly, they don’t. The ending is the kind of unusual surrealism I quite like to see in games but here, for some reason, it seemed incomplete, almost as if they didn’t expect anyone to finish all 50 levels.
Vizati makes a valiant attempt to bring original artwork, music, atmosphere and something a bit different to the usually quite staid puzzle genre. Unfortunately, with a story mode that is anything but, and an arcade mode that doesn’t require all that much puzzling, there’s not really enough here to justify the £6 price tag.
63%
Vizati is available from GamersGate and Impulse.
If you’re not “…one for puzzles. I don’t have a brain that can mentally untangle a problem…” then why in God’s name would you even play it, let alone review it, along with sprinkling your review with particularly snide remarks? Do you work for a competitor and are trying to make sure no one buys the game?
While, granted, the game is a bit on the short side (50 levels…at least, for now) and the story is minimal (and hasn’t a real ending), the whole point of the game is the PUZZLES, and not the very well done peripherals, excepting the great tutorials and accompanying PDF Manual.
I DID purchase the game, for $8.95 USD, and thoroughly enjoyed solving them, along with the painterly graphics, ethereal music and excellent tutorials…I partcularly liked the onomatopoetic, little dog’s “uaff!”
For everyone else, please DO try the demo, and make your own decision, instead of writing it off based on this person’ bias.
I think even if a rabid puzzle fan had reviewed this, there’d be the question of how well the review presented the game to people who aren’t puzzlemaniacs, ie: most people. At least he played through the whole thing.
Goodness. 50 levels “for now”, eh? How would you happen to know this?
I played this game because developers send us games to review – like, for free publicity. No other writer wanted to play a match-3 puzzle game so I stepped forward because I like to try and support indie developers. It was a case of me writing about it, or no one writing about it. And shouldn’t games, especially ones as casual as match-3 puzzlers attempt to appeal to everyone? Even folk like me?
I have written a fair review which reflects the game’s unusual approach and attractive art style but also the failure of the story aspect – the whole point of the game is not the puzzles if a “story mode” is included. It’s unfortunate that you read any of my words as snide as none were intended to be.
I’m glad you’ve voiced a counter argument, and I would love people to buy DifferentPixel’s game to support them as indies – if they think they could get £6.00′s worth of fun out of it. This is reflected by an overall score of 63% – which is not bad. This is not bias, it’s simply my opinion.
Ho hum. Don’t feed the trolls.
Can I ask where and how you justified 63% for a game you say isn’t even worth a £6 price tag? I really don’t understand these bizarrely specific scoring systems anyway. What’s the difference between 60% and 65%? A few endorphins spread over a couple of hours?
Your article reads more like “What I did on my Summer Holidays” than a review. Should one not attempt to see a game and appreciate it for what it might be to people reading said article?
On a positive note I very much approve of the writing style in your concluding paragraph.
Can I ask where and how you justified 63% for a game you say isn’t even worth a £6 price tag?
– If you look at our scoring guide (http://www.gamingdaily.co.uk/what-our-scores-mean/), you would see that something scored in the low 60s counts as “if it’s really, really cheap and you have literally nothing better to do, possibly consider it.” Subjectively £6 is not really cheap for this.
What’s the difference between 60% and 65%?
– 5%
I’ll leave Paul to respond to the rest if he wants to.
You raise a good point with the fact that a review should be trying to get an appreciation of the game. In the reviews I’ve written on my site, I know there will be some person who will like any game, no matter what.
Surely a review is one person’s views and final recommendation on the game? I recently reviewed Tomb Raider: Legend, and slammed it to pieces, and said I couldn’t recommend it to anyone but a hardcore TR fan. Someone else might have played it and thought it was well written, with interesting puzzles and fun combat. I may think they are an idiot, but that’s their view.
Please refer to our scoring policy below. 63% reflects the fact that I feel it’s close to being not worth your time (ie in the 50s) but may be worth picking up if it becomes cheaper and you feel so inclined (ie in the 60s). The score doesn’t stand alone, it accompanies the text of the review.
You ask the impossible of me – how can I review a game based upon the opinions of a hypothetical third party? It’s all very well pondering what the game might be to whomever, by ultimately I played the game and can only describe my opinions with any validity. Reviews trying to do otherwise are just clouding the water.
I can only take your “What I did on my Summer Holidays” comment as a compliment. That was exactly the style I was aiming for.