Recent reviews by Bouncing Blocks

The art style is definitely nice. I did enjoy the characters (except that the little brother was being a jerk at times) - and the world is wonderful. The soundtrack is also very good, it's worth going through the unintelligible babbles of the characters just to listen to it.

However, there are quite a few things I didn't enjoy. The controls are clunky, and I often ended up using the wrong stick to move a character. Moving 2 things at once is difficult and your fingers will hurt from pressing the triggers for a long time. The puzzles feel like gimmicks, it's as if they were here just to have you do something instead of having the game be an interactive movie. Take character 1 and take it to point A, take character 2 and bring it to point B, do thing, rinse and repeat. And yes, it's extremely linear. Don't expect to be able to explore the beautiful environments they show you - there is the way and you can't go elsewhere. You don't have any choice. It's also short. Like, very short. You'll complete it in an evening, and never play it again (it's linear, you'd do the exact same thing anyway). You can see how long I've been playing from here, and I took a good hour of breaks while the game was still running.

Now on to the story Spoilers ahead|. Apparently, all the grown men on Steam ended up in tears at the end. I did not. I conclude that I am a heartless ♥♥♥♥ who doesn't feel empathy. You have to cure your sick father using water from some fountain in a tree miles and miles away from home, requiring going through a mine filled with ogres, a battlefield of giants and a frozen castle surrounded by dead people, haunted by an invisible giant. Sounds like a task for two kids, right ? (biggest spoiler ahead, don't read if you plan on playing the game, it's the only interesting part) Also, big brother ends up dead. I'm fairly sure the dad would have prefered to die rather than have his son die for him. Well. I guess I didn't receive the message the game sends. You might.

Conclusion : They might as well have made it into an animated movie, it would have been prettier and hurt my fingers less. probably worth it for 3 bucks (and only if you already have a controller, this isn't worth buying one), but not at full price. Or maybe I just played it with too high expectations due to the people who called it a masterpiece of an emotionnal rollercoaster which left them wet-faced.

PS : here's something I was thinking about. The mom is blonde and the dad's a ginger. Genes that code blonde hair and red hair are mostly recessive, which means that the mother has 2 "blonde" genes and the dad 2 "redhair" genes. Now explain big brother's brown hair. Just an idea.

Very great game. However, I'd recommend getting the Brave New World extension and Gold edition if possible. You will have much more fun that way, as the 'vanilla' version isn't that great. I would actually recommend getting the Gold Edition and play with it a bit until you get to Brave new world (it has the same things than in Gold and much more complex things). If you're interested in strategy games that aren't that complex, this game is for you.