I think this must be the most casual casual game I've ever played. 15/5! Perfect for playing while doing housework, homework, or just about any work. ...Okay, maaaybe not if you're a doctor, or driving, or using live ordnance.
@Demoknis, I still haven't managed to get regular tailslides of more than a couple of metres except by accident. I've gotten really good at starslides, though... Here are some tips: 1. Remember, you're looking for a horizontal-ish band of stars across the regular starry background. Trying to starslide when there's no 'Milky Way' to make your way along does no good! 2. You really have to be nearly vertical, nose up, for starsliding to 'take' -- so once you think you're near a starsliding spot, stop forward or back-flipping and just tweak your angle. 3. Make sure your finger's ready on the down key! But pressing it prematurely can actually hurt your chance of starsliding (and presumably regular tailsliding, too). Vote this up if you found it helpful...
Ironically, I'm usually crap at these 'one free space' sliding puzzles. Something about it being dynamic / interactive in more than one way, I guess, makes it make sense to me where the usual static-tile sliding puzzles just frustrate me. "Continuity" tickles my spatial reasoning centers and makes them purr. Had a blast finishing all 32 levels. 7/5, if I could!
I really wish I didn't need sound off to get subtitles. Some of us do best with both. Other than that, an interesting point-and-click, with an interesting premise, an interesting feature (anomaly meter) and two different endings. Perhaps the puzzles were a little too easy, but that's better than them being too hard. 4/5 and I'd love a sequel...
More spooky than scary per se, to me. The torch rooms were creepy, as were the bugs & all the lit candles. Good visuals all round. And the twist in the ending was not at all what I expected! Nice point-&-click for Halloween, if a touch overly-easy: 4/5
That was really fun! And I'm not usually a fan of side-scrolling button-mashing "action platformer" games. Was anyone else reminded of "Samurai Jack" at all? Also loved the Hong-Kong-cinema-wire-fu effect when you jumped up for an attack and just kept attacking. Great art & character designs, too.
Ha, awesome game! I gave Alter 5/5 for the originality of the character designs & story, the humor, the plethora of stuff to discover, the difficulty options, the unlockables, & the four different endings. With all the other bells and whistles it has, I'm surprised it doesn't have any Achievements yet. Or a sequel. Impressive replayability for such a relatively-short game, yet it still leaves me wanting a little bit more...
The official walkthrough is missing a few of the orb locations: #1 After passing the alien amazed by grass, DON'T enter the collapsed house! Instead, jump up onto its roof (you may need to grow, but there's a save/refill spot up there) & continue to the right until you see a tiny tunnel. Shrink down & take the tunnel, picking up some orbs & dropping into the house. Either help the alien get his key, or not. (It seems you must break the vase to pass this area.) * #2 After the house, you'll see an orb or two under the ground. Remember them for a few seconds; when you get to the cliff & the webs, shrink all the way down & try to drop all the way down so you can get to the left. It may take a few tries. Once you're past the webs the cave is a cakewalk & at the end of it there's a :) made of orbs!
{{Bug report: I found a wallswim near the beginning of the game, where there's a spiral-shaped pit of spikes... you can't get down it without ducking, but if you manage to hit left-arrow + down-arrow just right, instead of dropping into the passage, you wind up inside the wall, and trying to go back right pushes you left; you can jump out from there, or go until you hit the spikes in the shallow pit from beneath. Hardly game-breaking, but some designers prefer not to leave anything like that in. It's hard enough to get to that I'd leave it for the aesthetic, personally.}}
My first time playing, I went through without obeying more than twice the whole game. (Being told I don't know what gender I am sets my teeth on edge, I guess...) So I had maximum "trippy colorful"-ness, but still managed to find the secret passage without even knowing one was supposed to be there. When I played through with a nearly-even mix -- some colors & some detail both -- the passage wasn't there. Then when I tried playing a third time only obeying, there the passage was again... though interestingly, I couldn't get back past the spikes to get out of the passage when I could SEE the spikes. There's at least one other comment stating that ONLY by obeying is the secret passage functional, but that's incorrect. (The disobedient option actually gives a better, non-one-way passage.) Vote this up so it's what people see instead of the wrong info.
Sometimes simple means style -- like in this game. Nicely focussed on the important things, leaving everything else to the player's imagination. Charming and captivating, and with some replay value for those reasons despite it being, as others have mentioned, both relatively short and relatively easily solved.
Promising, but as many others mentioned, a lives system and/or savepoints would give this game a much wider audience. For those who like the unforgiving challenge of having to beat a game in a single sitting like it's 1980, a 'challenge' or 'hard' mode would satisfy everyone. Adding a 'casual' / 'easy' mode in addition to 'normal' difficulty would be nice for those of us who prefer the exploration aspect of platform games over the bragging rights. The rotation mechanic was impressively smooth, and the graphics were crisp and appealing, if not overly exciting. For the challenge fans, maybe see if you can add gravitational pressure inside the planet core, so that the guy is slowed down, or even crushed, if he takes to long down there...
I can't think of a fantasy-edged-with-science-fiction story with such gorgeous worldbuilding (and art!) since Carla Speed McNeil's "Finder" series. The depth of the world behind this short adventure is staggering, in addition to intriguing and interest-piquing. Everything from race and culture, to domestication and architecture, to spirituality and even the insular nature of small villages, is so much more developed than in any other game I can think of.
Do NOT miss Marek Rudowski's blog, where you can see the artwork and read about the development process for the larger adventure comic / game "The Big Old Tree That Dreamed," AKA "The Trader of Stories," which "The Bell's Heart" (this game) is just a small part of! It's at traderofstories.blogspot.com and is a must-read for anyone who enjoyed playing the Pastel-Games-licensed first 'episode' here.
Once... There were three cousins, each fairer than the last. All their mothers died toiling in the cruel warlord Vi's castle; their fathers died of grief; & their grandfathers of toiling in the fields. Only their beloved but bitter grandmothers remained, all sharing one hut with the three cousins. But the old women were wise, and taught them secret crafts, at night when all the day's work was done. As they grew up, the cousins grew wise and, with their youthful energy, powerful also. They opposed Vi, freeing the slaves from his castle and returning the harvests to the farmers so they would no longer need to work twice as hard just to feed their families. They offered Vi mercy, but he refused to change his ways, and they were forced to slay him in self-defence. The people proclaimed them rulers, and they used their powers to make the castle FLY! How cool is that?
I love this game so much. So META! Everyone who's ever played a platformer (whether they managed to beat it or not, especially if NOT) needs to play it.
I have never, EVER felt such a sense of suspense playing a point-&-click game.
I've also never played one so non-"cutesy" -- not that I object to cuteness, most of my favorite games are cartoony platformers! -- but this's the kind of game a guy can tell his FPS-fanatic friends he enjoyed without being called a wuss.
The intro & ending movies were, indeed, groundbreaking for a game of this type, on top of being impressive in any context.
The stone heads, and the way they spoiler spoiler spoiler, was an awesome touch, mysterious and, yes, totally eerie. I'm actually glad that Red Herring didn't try to explain everything about them in this game, since that would've taken away significantly from the suspense.
I would've enjoyed voices along with on-screen text, & more sound FX. That said, I MUCH prefer a game with no voicework over one with bad voicing (or if big audio files make the game run slower). Maybe in the sequel... There IS going to be a sequel, right?
This is a great game -- interesting, fun, with a bit of challenge but not so much that it stops being relaxing... except when one of the 'glow' animations (either from single-celled fish reproducing or any fish becoming infested by a parasite) makes the screen FREEZE! I don't know what previous 'screen freeze' bug was fixed, but I've had to end THREE games now because the screen stopped scrolling and I was stuck in the area shown. If there were at least a save, I could just exit & reload, but instead I lose all my progress every time.
I've found nearly 20, I think, of the different areas (hard to be sure because I went in different directions each playthrough & some locations overlapped) and definitely at least seven different creatures... yes, seven, it even said "7/6 creatures" when I spotted seven in just one playthrough.
The bug is unfortunately game-breaking. I really enjoy Ef, but the random, unpredictable freezes sap all that enjoyment.
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