Score: 8
"Brilliant Concept"
date: June 10, 2009
This game has truly innovative gameplay where you make copies of yourself to solve puzzles that cannot be solved single-handedly. However, I felt that the execution didn't take full advantage of the genius idea behind it.
Despite being an excellent game already, it does become unnecessarily tedious. Often I found myself standing on buttons merely waiting for 20 seconds, hoping I gave myself (and/or my additional copies) sufficient time to perform the necessary tasks. A button to hold down to speed up the game (make the time tick faster) would have helped tremendously in doing away with a lot of the of the monotonous, boring aspects of the game. Waiting and doing nothing should never be a fundamental aspect of any game if you ask me.
Another thing that is particularly frustrating is the way that the copies are drawn. They are displayed exactly the same as the active player with the exception that the active player has a green arrow over him. In most cases, this is okay, but for some levels it's necessary to match the actions of the copies exactly, and then what should be simple becomes a nightmarish task of trying to discern your player from your copies. It is very annoying to try to jump on the exact same fading platform as all of your copies (a few pixels too far left or right and you've ruined the puzzle) when you can't distinguish your player from the copies. Drawing the copies differently (ex: slightly translucent like ghosts) or at least fixing the z-ordering so that the active player is always drawn frontmost would have helped a lot.
I had to resort to a walkthrough for one puzzle only, and it wasn't because I didn't figure it out. In fact, I had already figured it out, I just couldn't believe that the game was expecting me to freeze time exactly at the right moment while a crate was falling (this was not so bad) and then jump on top of it when there was a ledge in my way blocking the jump (this was terrible). That's not challenging, it's just goofy and requires awkward controlling and luck to make such a goofy jump.
Finally, without interfering at all (just standing still at the door), I noticed that my copies would sometimes get their actions off by a bit. For example, even a simple recording where I jumped on a crate and picked it up would replay as my copy jumping on a crate and not picking it up. That was truly annoying and I would attribute about 10% to 15% of my restarts because of such inaccuracies.
Regardless of these problems, this is a truly original and interesting puzzle game, and with some slight improvements here and there, it could be one that stands the test of time as a truly original and groundbreaking gaming concept.
