Figment

What do you get when you mix Barney, Blues Clues, a Broadway Musical, Dr Zeuss derivatives, a Macromedia Flash version of Zelda and you try and make Conkers Bad Fur Day... Puzzles are simple, but time consuming Music ranges from tepid to uninsired to dissonant to kinder garden variety. Characters seem less inspired than most generic RPGMaker stock And the story ... Is just as good as the voice acting and dialog (they're terrible) The only huge plus is the background art, which is beautiful (but sadly, towards the end of the game there's a lot of gray and it's mostly lost) The game had huge potential but it just doesn't workout. I'm sure it took a lot of effort, but I'm also sure I would not recommend it. The stiff and buggy controls don't add to gameplay experience. But I think it's the god awful humor that takes the cake here: "Why is 1/5 always angry? Because it's two tenth" ... If you think that's funny, you'll love rest of it. I don't like bashing things, I've only done that once here before for other reasons... But in this case I rather say this than have someone else think oh ... nice surrealistic piece of art, I'm sure it was a misunderstanding ... nope, I think you'll have more fun balancing your checkbook or having a field day at the dentists. If you really are curious, have a go at Ataris ET and then come back here... You've been warned

Deep discount, sure it's worth it. Full price? It has issues. All around the concept and design are good, the style is whimsical, sound design is pretty good, puzzles are reasonable. However it has flaws that start to drag on. Combat is terrible and woefully unbalances. The big snot hounds are nearly impossible to kill, and annoying to listen to rapid sneezing as you try to take one out. The spiders are practically pointless as they pose no challenge. Controls are janky because it's a diagonal world but cardinal direction keys, and the environment constantly gets in the way of movement. One puzzle was also impossible as unlike all the others that give you clues you generally don't need, it had no clues at all and there was nothing to divine, it was pure trial and error with hundreds of combinations so you just have to look up the answer. But even puzzling your way through the world starts to get tiring as you run back and forth back and forth wait for long interaction animations and largely no longer feel challenged. So for a couple bucks it's a decent time spend for a few hours, past that it really has to be your cup of tea to finish it out. With just a little more attention to the controls and combat balance and some minor tweaks it would have been a home run.

I will not blame devs for this as its likely they have no idea this has been put in their game by the engine, but I must warn people about it anyways.

Who is this game for? Is it supposed to be flowing, or tedious? It feels way to easy for an adult, and way to sophisticated for a child. Yet the story is so ... I don't even think I have the right vocabulary for it: not exactly dark (even though the intro suggest a car crash), not exactly complex (after the 1st chunk I can say the story is really straightforward, but with "long words" used as names for things: dopamine, neurons...), not exactly chaotic (but who is the villain, for reals?), not exactly mysterious (but we play in the mind of the adult, or the kid?). It's... not for me, and I can't really guess who is this for.

Overall, a beautiful puzzle platformer. Visually, I'm left feeling that it's what the 3D Rayman games would have been if the available technology at the time had been more capable of expressing the necessary art style. I love that each boss has their own song and, aside from one line in the plague nightmare's song which I think is in poor taste, I like them all. As for the puzzles, I'm not a huge fan of the timed puzzles in clockwork town (especially the one where you have to race the clock AND dodge the razor-sharp clock hands), and I'm also not a huge fan of the "Sokoban the shield around while saying protected from the waves of despair puzzles", but I had no complaints otherwise. I did notice a couple of times when a boss got stuck on geometry for a second or two during a cutscene and then teleported to the next keyframe'd position, but, otherwise, the game has been solid for me. The choice to end on a movie-style "song with vocals playing over a stylized credits crawl" left me feeling "Now THAT was how you do a game which aspires to movie-like storytelling without making the player grow to resent what cutscenes there are!" NOTE: I play my platformers using an XBox 360 pad, so my rating doesn't take into account how the game may control without one.