Played Elroy and the Aliens.
Nice graphics and voice acting. Decent music and plot. Easy puzzles. Gets better the longer you play, but the end is pretty abrupt. Like Near Mage, I find it difficult not to appreciate the effort and ambition behind it, but the result somehow falls short of its full potential, at least for me.
Again, it comes down to the design, largely in form of the puzzles.
That got me to think about what makes and doesn’t make a good puzzle. Difficulty, moon logic and all that aside, I think that broadly speaking, there are two categories to fall into:
- puzzles that impede the plot
- puzzles that drive the plot forward
Former are bad, latter are good. Elroy and the Aliens is full of the former.
The way I think about it, any puzzle that gets the player closer to a known goal falls into category 2, as does any puzzle whose outcome is unexpected and propels the plot into a new direction. The Monkey Island games are good examples for that: MI1 has the three trials, assembling a crew, finding Monkey Island. MI2 has assembling the voodoo doll, finding the map pieces, etc. . All those require a lot of steps, but usually, each successful puzzle ticks off one item from the todo list and brings the player closer to the goal. You will not perform any action and suddenly the game adds five new things to that todo list.
Puzzles that do not tick off items or show up out of thin air OTOH are an impediment. Take the first task in Elroy as an example: assemble a rocket, fuel it up and launch it. So you pick up the parts, put them together, pick up the fuel canister … and the nozzle falls off. Impediment!
You fix the canister, fill up the tank, and now a bird hops onto the rocket, preventing the launch. Impediment!
To me, these feel like one step forward, two steps back. It’s not rewarding or encouraging, it’s frustrating. Frustration is not fun and thus the game is not fun.
I remember that I had a similar feeling when writing about my experience with Tales. Perhaps here it’s not as pronounced, but again my impression is that a lot of the puzzles are detracting from the plot instead of reinforcing it. And since they are not particular clever or memorable in and of themselves, they drag down the whole experience.
All in all, maybe a good game to play with kids while they are small and not overly critical. It’s family friendly, colorful and not overly taxing. Can’t really recommend it to seasoned P&C adventure players, though.