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So.

I played Maquette.

First off, this game's beautiful. The whole time, the visuals are just stunning. They consistently blew me away.

Sadly, the unqualified praise kinda ends there.

Maquette is a perspective-based puzzle game where you make things bigger or smaller by interacting with a small model of the area you're in. It's a really cool mechanic, and the puzzles are, generally, pretty solid.

That's the little model. The round building is where I'm standing, and inside it is an even littler model. Etc. You can go further out, too, making the world bigger and bigger.

You can also go too far out.

Which brings me to my first and probably most minor complaint: checkpoints. The game is set up in 5-or-so chapters with different hubs, and you only ever get checkpoints at the very start of a chapter. The situation above, and another situation where I softlocked the game by messing up a puzzle, meant I had to restart the entire chapter. I found out later there's a keybind to reset yourself, but I didn't know about it then. So, I had to play a lot of the game multiple times.

This also meant I had to watch cutscenes multiple times. Long, boring, dialogue-only cutscenes that I could not care at all about. The story in the game is nothing. It's the framework for a love story where they forgot to put the interesting parts in, so it just ends up as a man whinging about being divorced and how his wife didn't like it when he yelled at her. That's uncharitable, I admit, but the game didn't give me much inclination to be charitable to the story.

Ultimately, the game is just disappointing. The puzzles themselves are fun and I'd love to see the ideas explored some more, but this game was more interested in being a sad poem than it was in being a puzzle game. There's only a handful of actual puzzles in the game, and you have to slog through way too much to get to them for it to be worth it.

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Aw Shucks

So, here's my first real post. I'm just gonna start with the game I just finished today, cuz that just makes sense.

The game is Oh Jeez, Oh No, My Rabbits Are Gone!!!, a title which is very difficult to search for online without just getting posts about rabbits.

OJONMRAG is a simple little puzzle-platformer wherein you rescue your 100 lost bunnies. It plays, for lack of a better comparison, like a mix of Lemmings, Another World, and A Boy and His Blob. I would argue, though, that the aspects borrowed from those games are pretty much all executed better here, which is an impressive feat. The main gameplay loop is exploring an area to find bunnies, and then directing those bunnies past obstacles in order to rescue them.

The controls are... Mixed. They are a bit clunky, and it took quite a while for me to truly feel accustomed to them. That clunkiness isn't without reason, though: it's a cost of precision. This game has a very obvious grid layout, and every action, every jump and climb and run, moves you a very set, consistent distance. In a puzzle game like this, the benefits of that really can't be understated. It allows for much cleaner, more nuanced puzzles, where there's no need to worry about players getting stuck trying to jump up a wall that goes nowhere or fixating on a rock. It focuses both the design and the player, which is very welcome in a climate where puzzle games largely feel a pressure to think far outside the box, regardless of how that fits with the game.

It's like... A sokoban. Imagine a sokoban where nothing is rigid, boxes aren't stuck to the grid, and so forth. Sure, it could be done. It probably has been. But not needing to be that lets sokoban games more easily be designed with other challenges in mind.

Moving on, there's not too much to be said about the actual structure of the game, I think. It's solid. Good, even. The world feels real, the exploration feels like... exploration. It's good. It took me about 4 hours to beat, finding all the bunnies but missing a couple color palettes (finding them lets you change the main character's colors.)

As an added bonus, you start the game with a range of color palettes based on pride flags.

Finally, visually, the game is adorable. It's the kind of aesthetic that needs to be sincere to shine, and oh boy is it sincere. There's cute bunnies, cute landscapes, and cute gay girls. It's everything you could want in a cute game.

And yes, you can pet the bunnies.

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Video Games

I guess I should have an inaugural post so here it is. I’m Leaf, I play a lot of games and have a lot of thoughts about those games, and so people encouraged me to put them on a blog. Basically, whenever I finish a game I’m gonna write up a thing about it. Easy Peasy