Saturday Casual Gaming 235: Elephant Quest

Elephant Quest
From Armor Games, Jimp, and jmtb02
on Kongregate

Every so often, I like to go back to certain games after I've beaten them. I mean, me beating a game is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself that it's pretty noteworthy, but sometimes a game is good enough to return to. Elephant Quest is one such game.

This game is older than you'd think. Armor Games was pretty small when this game appeared on Kongregate, and I have many happy memories of getting stuck in that one block on level 8, blasting my way through Nudgers, and reveling in the fact that there was so much blue in this game! Seriously, it's old enough that blue was not back in vogue at the time. It was still in the barren wasteland of brown and gray.

Seriously, it's really blue. I love it.

Sadly, if you click on the merchant button, they no longer have gear through Armor Games, but the game is still available both there and on Kongregate!

Anyway, what is the story for this little platformer?

You are Elephant the Elephant (yes, that's seriously your name).

You are a dapper little pachyderm.

You're hanging out with the other elephants, who aren't named Elephant by the way (some are named Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington...), when the local ruffian, a bully named Woolly, shows up and decides what's his is his, but what's yours is his too. He ganks your bowler and books it.

Elephant is, understandably, heartbroken over this.

The rest of this game is your quest to regain your hat and beat down that mammoth! Sounds simple, right?

Well, it's kinda harder than it sounds. You're dropped, sans any instruction, into this screen, which has an adorable Yoshi's Crafted World-esque backdrop that I love.

What do? Well, you move with the arrow keys, apparently...

After clicking around (which activates the laser cannon on your back - yes you have a laser cannon, you really liked that hat), I eventually realized that the arrow keys move, so I approached the shiny yellow elephant. His name is Sprouts. A prompt to press the "down" arrow popped up, so I did so.

This activates a dialogue with Sprouts, who tells you what you've already figured out...
you use arrow keys to move, mouse to attack. Up key jumps. Down key interacts.

Sprouts is your first indication that this game is a bit silly. Okay, the fact that you're an elephant named Elephant toting laser cannons and going after a kleptomaniac woolly mammoth named Woolly might have been your first clue, but the fact remains, there are no serious moments in this game. Nothing is dour or dark or bitter. I mean, Elephant's pretty bitter about his bowler, but he's not going full Batman or anything.

The rest of the game is spent doing fetch-quests for other elephants, like hunting balloons for the Bob brothers (Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington), finding lost teddy bears or umbrellas, etc, while you hunt down Woolly. While you're doing these quests, literally everything in this world tries to kill you. Creatures, spikes, endless pits... the world hates elephants. Luckily, you've got a laser cannon or six to help you out, and the more you level up or complete quests, the more firepower and health you gain!

But how do you level up?

You shoot everything that's not an elephant. Seriously. Every moving thing wants you dead, so kill it first.

One of my favorite rooms is this one. I call it the Kill Pit.
You just sit up on the slope and shoot everything to death down there.
You also get the Yellow Key, which you'll need.

When you level up, the box with your level number will glow. You click on it and it takes you to the skill tree. Which is more of a skill jungle. Seriously, there's, like, a million little things to click on. The skill tree takes Credits (which you get about two of with every level), and when you spend them, you might get skill points (if you land on an orange, purple, green, or blue node) or health (red nodes). There are yellow nodes that give you a random node color, too, but they're pretty uncommon. Then, you take all of the skill points you just got from your nodes and head down to the teal part of the menu you're on.

This section is fairly self explanatory...

So you've got your points, you spend them on one of three different sub-skills per skill path. When you hit 25 points in a single section, you get a bonus. Acrobatics improves your jump height, Weapon Targeting gives you better aim with less jitter, Weapons makes your lasers hurt more, and the Miniphant Swarm gives you laser-shooting flying pygmy elephants who swarm around you and murder your foes. I like to max out the Swarm as quickly as possible.

You can also improve your damage resistance, health, how many credits you get per levelup, resistance to spike damage specifically, how fast you move, how quickly you regenerate health, how much XP you gain from quests, and "how cute you look".

The lavender bar on the menu takes you to the Level Map, which is... kinda simple. It's basically screenshots of the different levels with lines connecting the doors to each other. It's useful if you get lost, which you probably will, because the game is bigger than you'd expect from a Flash game from 2011.

The orange bar keeps track of your Quests, which will help you when you get confused about who needs what where and how you need to get it.

Then you've got the goldenrod bar at the bottom that takes you back to the game.

You can die in this game, by the way. If you get swarmed by Nudgers or something, they can absolutely kill you. Thankfully, I have yet to encounter a game-over screen in eight years of play. You just instantly respawn. This can be an issue if the flying enemies swarm you in the center of the level and you have to creep your way back to the door so you can leave, but aside from that, it's really useful.

Yes, you respawn where you fall. Yes, that can be very annoying.

But nothing makes the game bad. I had to restart once because there's a bug in Zone 8 where you can jump into a specific block and get trapped (though sometimes sufficient wiggling can release you), but even that was quaint and funny!

If you're absolute trash at platformers, love elephants, and want to shoot some weird slime birds with lasers, definitely give Elephant Quest a try!


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