casual | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Hidden My Game By Mom!

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 12:00:00 -0700

Hidden My Game By Mom is a quick, quirky, and delightful little puzzle starring a boy addicted to his handheld gaming device and his mother’s attempts to hide it from him in increasingly bizarre ways. You, the real-life gamer that you are, vicariously strike back against the parental anti-game tyranny you may or may not have actually experienced by interacting with the scene to find this boy’s game. The core gameplay revolves around collecting items and using them in clever and silly ways to reveal where the boy’s game was hidden, but this comes with a catch: Mom is also hiding in nearly every level, often in more absurd places than the game. Find the game, win the level; find Mom, you’re busted.

This simple hidden object puzzle takes on another level of meaning when moving past the zaniness of the what and moving into the relational why. Hidden My Game By Mom proposes the simple premise of Mom as antagonist, someone to be outsmarted and evaded. But as we progress, it’s difficult to leave the boy’s motives unquestioned. At one point, we distract the boy’s older sister from doing her homework so our boy can get back to his gaming. In another level, the boy digs through literal poop to be reunited with his cherished handheld. This is a caricature of both the boy’s love for his game and the lengths his mom would go to stop him, to be sure, but something rings true about his mom’s implicit concern that this all might be getting out of hand. And after a surprising and emotional gut punch of a finale, no amount of broken English in the UI can hide Hidden My Game By Mom’s core message.

A parent’s love might come out as riding a giraffe’s head or feeding an elephant your gaming device, but it’s love all the same. We can argue with the methods and the logic, but (at some level) we should try to appreciate that they were doing the best they knew how.

Tap! Dig! My Museum!

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 12:00:00 -0700

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of Tap! Dig! My Museum! is in its title. In this free mobile idler, you play as an aspiring dinosaur archaeologist and newfound owner of a museum in disrepair. By enticing patrons to your museum, you collect the coins they drop as they react to your dinosaurs. In turn, you invest your cash into archaeological digs — where you tap away at sand to uncover hidden bones — and upgrades which make said digs easier. The more dinosaurs you complete, the more people come flooding in to see them, which in turn leads to more money, which in turn leads to more dinosaurs. You get the idea.

Tap! Dig! My Museum! is a perfect free game in the sense that it never artificially handicaps the player’s progress. If you want to keep unearthing dinosaur fossils, nobody’s stopping you. Mandatory ads are never longer than 15 seconds, and ads that grant bonuses (like a school bus that brings a swarm of visitors to boost your income) are never longer than 30. As of version 1.3.0 (which added a second floor to the museum and oceanic dinos!), the whole experience only took about 18 hours to complete — ads and plenty of AFK coin collecting included. After being burned by many a “free-to-play” mobile game, it was nice to actually finish one fair and square.

There is exactly one interesting wrinkle that shook up gameplay in what was otherwise an enjoyable but repetitive experience. Occasionally, while on a dig, I’d uncover a bone fragment that didn’t belong to the dinosaur I was excavating. These remained elusive until finding more across other dig sites, as Tap! Dig! My Museum! began to drop subtle clues about where I could find others. I soon found myself flipping through the in-game dinosaur book with newfound importance, trying to track down mysterious new creatures. In those moments, even if it was in a cartoonish, silly kind of way, I felt like I was solving a pre-historic mystery. And, after all, that’s what this is all about.

Splashy Dots

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 12:00:00 -0700

Creating an iOS puzzle game with minimalist design and the latest iOS features (3D Touch, Haptic, etc.) seems to be the surefire strategy for getting featured by Apple in the App Store in the late 2010s. But despite attaining that all-important medal of honor, Splashy Dots serves, at best, a bland and lightly logical time-waster.

At its core, Splashy Dots is about connecting dots on a grid, starting and ending at specified locations without being allowed to backtrack. Its aesthetic is vaguely reminiscent of an art gallery, and connecting the colored dots is something like “paint through all the colors without lifting your paintbrush”. Except the colors don’t matter, and the “paintings” that comprise the levels never end up looking like anything nice (unless you really like abstract art, in which case, knock yourself out).

It’s difficult not to compare Splashy Dots to other casual puzzle games that are unequivocally richer experiences. Take Dots and its excellent sequel Two Dots, for example. Splashy Dots seems to be a carbon copy when it comes to the Dots games' minimalist designs, but replaces the innovative and progressively more difficult gameplay with an inane, repetitive experience. Or, if we want to focus more on the “art” aspect, consider any Picross game. Despite being quite repetitive, Picross stays engaging by promising the player that all the numbers and squares will eventually depict something. It’s a promise that the experience will be rewarding, even if that reward is just a pixelated happy face. Splashy Dots, in turn, offers every combination of colored lines imaginable. And something about discovering hundreds of crappy paintings just isn’t a formula that keeps me coming back for more.

Blendoku 2

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Blendoku 2 is an excellent example of a free, mobile puzzle game done right. Based on the deceptively simple concept of sorting colors, Blendoku 2 offers great depth of content and innovative mechanics to a mobile puzzle scene overrun by match-three spinoffs and their ilk.

Gameplay is straightforward: a crossword-like board is presented with a small number of colored tiles already filled in. Players must then place the remaining colors into the correct spaces so that the resulting board follows some sort of color gradient. Variants on this basic formula include “Keyless”, where the original board has no preset tiles; “Decoys,” where some tiles are red herrings and not part of the end configuration, and “Clones,” where a color corresponds to multiple spaces on the board. Completionists can challenge themselves to beat levels faster than the world average time and do so perfectly, avoiding putting any colors in incorrect locations. Achievements accompany these feats and more (and all are possible without payment).

Levels are organized by difficulty. The base game, which is completely free, includes generous amounts of content: 150 “simple” levels, 150 “medium,” 100 “hard,” 100 “master,” and 50 bonus “thanks” levels. This was more than enough to provide a satisfying experience, and interested players can more than double the number of levels by purchasing level packs. Monetization, per usual, comes from ads played between levels.

There are a variety of other game modes and perks to discover throughout the game, including a multiplayer versus mode, “painting” levels, a “color IQ” test, and a daily challenge level. These are all nice enough experiences, demonstrating the developers’ abilities to strike a near-perfect balance between providing abundant content and remaining focused on their core gameplay. As a result, Blendoku 2 feels full without trying to do too much.

All in all, Blendoku 2’s commitment to simplicity in design and mechanics combined with its plethora of free content makes it a must-try for puzzle lovers.

June's Journey

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:00:00 -0700

Hidden object games moved from their old dwellings in children’s sections of newspapers to new homes on touchscreens in the early iOS era, and every generation of the operating system sees a new app iterate over the same mechanics. More of the same isn’t always bad — it’s nice to have new apps with refreshed graphics to replace aging legacy games that are no longer supported — but nevertheless, newcomers must somehow justify their existence. June’s Journey had a promising plan to do so: wrap classic hidden object gameplay in a mystery story and toss in some city building-esque filler as a bonus. But it ultimately commits too many sins of other free-to-play, casual games to remain enjoyable, and a poorly executed progression system subjects players to numbing repetition.

The setting is fairly simple. June is a British WWI veteran nurse with a knack for quick thinking and insightful observations. Upon learning that her sister and brother-in-law were murdered, purportedly in a murder-suicide by her brother-in-law’s own hand, she travels to New York to find answers. Your mission quite literally becomes June’s: find hidden clues which steadily reveal more of the mystery, bringing you closer to the only answers that will make sense of the violence. As an aside, the family estate has fallen into some disrepair, so coins and resources gained from completing levels can be put towards decorating and renovating dilapidated structures.

The progression system is superficial, to say the least. Each hidden object scene can only be accessed after the player reaches the corresponding player level. Player level increases with flowers, a strange disguise for a typical XP/leveling system. But instead of earning flowers through playing levels and finding objects (which one could argue is the whole point), flowers are rewarded for buying decorations and upgrading buildings on the estate. This creates an illogical and contrived system of currencies: playing levels rewards coins and materials, which in turn are used to buy decorations and building upgrades, which in turn reward flowers that sum to higher player levels, which in turn unlock new levels one-by-one. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated, it’s because it is. Very little is gained from each currency exchange, and binding a player’s story progression to the number of trellises built and bushes planted can only be seen as a ploy to make content last longer.

The joy of a hidden object game is in finding things. There’s nothing wrong with adding extra elements to the gameplay; a good story is a boon to any game, and rewarding players with an increasingly sprawling and beautiful estate to mark their time investment is quite nice. But when grinding for levels and resources reduces finding hidden objects to memorizing where on the screen to tap, there can be no arguing that June’s Journey lost sight of its core gameplay which should have remained its soul.

Sputnik Eyes

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 12:00:00 -0700

Sputnik Eyes is a puzzle game adorned with a playful atmosphere in which you’re tasked with guiding exploratory colored robots to matching color positions in order to discover new planets. The aesthetic is greatly inspired by space exploration and the mathematical field of graph theory, which delivers enjoyable mechanics for mathy logic puzzles in minimalist artwork and easily understood controls. The UI is full of adorable artwork, reminiscent of cartoon depictions of outer space that might decorate a child’s bedroom. The soundtrack is similarly dreamy, leveraging a handful of light, instrumental electronic songs on rotation to keep any one from becoming overplayed.

Although the levels vary in the layout of finishing positions and the number of robots, gameplay does have the potential to get somewhat repetitive, which I feel the game designer — Shelly Alon, who developed this game singlehandedly — was likely aware of. Completed levels form constellations (out of planets, not stars), and the game ends after just 65 planets — setting itself apart from content-vomiters like Candy Crush — and doesn’t force players to replay levels extensively to achieve some unlikely high score. Instead, there are challenges to complete levels under a (generous) time limit, and to do so in the minimum possible number of robot moves, providing a shallow level of replayability for those who want it.

All in all, Sputnik Eyes is a satisfying puzzle game resulting from heartfelt, thoughtful work that turns a hopeful eye to what lies beyond our atmosphere.