Saturday Casual Gaming - Two Eyes Nonogram

 

Hey Haven't Done One of These In A While!

Once upon a time, I had a new game on her every week. I'd play the game and then review it and I'd let you all know what I thought. Mobile games, PC games, even the occasional console game... I'd cover what I loved (or didn't) about a game every week.

Except I'd never finish the games. Well... except one or two.

I Finished Two Eyes - Nonogram.

This game is lovely and a perfect time-sink. Free to play from start to finish with an option to pay for zero ads (which, admittedly, could improve your experience), and with gorgeous art and lovely music, this game was well worth a download - especially since I love nonogram-style gameplay!

For those not in the know, a Nonogram game involves you filling in squares of a grid to make an image, guided only by some numbers. The games usually have a tutorial (sometimes unskippable) which teaches you how to use those numbers to figure out what you're drawing. They're also often story-based, where the pictures you're filling in are the illustrations. These tend towards the fairytale side of fiction, so if that's not your cup of tea, you may find yourself simply in it for the gameplay, which is still quite rewarding!

Two Eyes, which is published by GAMEFOX (I've played other games of theirs!) and is available on ios and android, tells the story of a wolf and a deer slowly coming to terms with the fact that they are reincarnations of a deeply loving couple. It's very Greek Tragedy and well-told, though you can kind of tell it's a translation (sometimes the sentence structures are a bit rigid and unnatural, for instance), but in the end, it's a sweet little story, and I was, as the kids say, there for it.

The art, as you can tell, is spectacular, but I will not spoil you for the pixel art aspect - that would be cheating, since the pixel art is the gameplay!

I will, however, tell you that the story is broken into which character you're following (Wolf puzzles or Deer puzzles), and every story is broken down further into chapters. There are story-advancing puzzles and non-story-advancing puzzles, and both are fun! The story-advancing puzzles are arranged in a large 36 puzzle grid and range from 10x10 to 30x30. After you complete one character's story, you can finish the other character's story to see it from their perspective (the titular Two Eyes), or you can skip to the bittersweet finale.

The finale is the hardest part to get through with a triad of brutal 6x6 grids of 30x30 puzzles to get through. Your reward, however, is seeing the end of this lovely little story of enduring love.

Now, I mentioned the ad-free purchase option earlier. In my opinion, having an ad after ever two or three puzzles is a very fair tradeoff. For me, these ads were always easy to exit out of after about five or ten seconds, and I only accidentally fatfingered them once or twice. It was not economical or necessary for me to pay the oh-so-steep (sarcasm there, friend) price of two whole American dollars for the luxury of not seeing ads for a local guy who fixes basements for a decent price. Definitely pay for the ad-free version if you find the ads obnoxious, though, because the money goes towards making a bunch of beautifully drawn nonogram games like this one!

I can strongly recommend Two Eyes Nonogram to anyone who loves casual, untimed puzzle games.

That's all from me today!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 247: Little Idle Monsters

In Which I Play A Fun Little Idle Game!

I was going to do a review of a nonograms game (it's an art game) this week, but the game is still unfolding and there's a shockingly deep story, so instead, I'll be telling you about a gem of a game called Little Idle Monsters from developer Junjo, who you may recall from earlier reviews I did of their Farm Rush and Farm Idle games!

A simple concept, yet still lots of fun!

So the basic story of  Little Idle Monsters is that you're the bad guy and you're summoning hordes of critters with your magic deck of cards to terrorize the townsfolk around you. You draw cards from your deck, building fear in the hearts of your enemies. Fear is your currency, here, and you use it for everything from building up your creature arsenal to building up the dread you cause to conning the deck into letting you pull multiple cards at once to training your monsters to cause mayhem and slaughter the uppity peasants.

All against an adorable SNES/Sega-style background!

The game is pretty simple to play - click on the deck to deal cards faster, click on highlighted buttons to purchase upgrades, click on the town button to raze the villages and outposts.

Which is really quite fun!

If you're looking for a way to release some frustration without causing real-world harm, definitely give this game a play on Kongregate or mobile, since it's available on the app store now!

So yeah, give this game a play, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 246: Pocket Forest

In Which I Slide and Match Three

I like me some mobile games - especially when they're free! Pocket Forest is an offering from developer Battle Mango and available on the Google Play Store.

But it's far more complicated than it first appears!

Pocket Forest has a lot going for it. It's a match-3 game, which I love, but it's also a sliding tiles game, which means that in order to match three of the same image (dirt, grass, water; fox, tree, droplet, and up), you have to slide rows and columns until images match up. Oh, and you have limited moves with which to slide! Thankfully, tapping the groups of three or more doesn't take a move from your pool.

Now, as if that wasn't enough to keep track of just in the gameplay, tiles can interact! If you match 3 water tiles of the same level, they'll water the tiles around them! Dirt tiles will become grass tiles (which is annoying if you're trying to get more animal tiles!), tree or plant tiles (but not grass tiles) bear fruit that will automatically be fed to any directly adjacent animals, netting you extra points! I have only played the first zone and haven't filled the Bestiary yet, and I'm already addicted.

Oh, I didn't mention the Bestiary?

Yeah, there's a Bestiary!

A fairly extensive Bestiary, too!

I'm pretty sure the above image is from an older build of the game, but! It shows basically what happens.

You play your level until you run out of moves (and by the way, tiles will auto-merge if they're next to each other at the end of a level, so you can use that to your advantage!), and at the top, you'll see three stars. Each star fills as you gain points, and they represent the potential rarity of animals you'll encounter as a reward. My first animal was a sweet little fox, and one of the cool aspects of this sticker-style collection is that you get to pet the animals.

Ever wanted to pet a brown bear?

Now you can! And without getting mauled, no less!

Now, you can only pet them once, sadly... until you find a duplicate! I have my little lizard 100% petted, and it gave me a bonus!

Actually, pretty much everything nets you bonuses in this game, so if you're having a hard time in real life and you just need a win, however, small, you can almost certainly squeak one out while playing this game for less than 10 minutes. Bonuses are usually buffs for in-game (like a button which places animals on all dirt tiles available, a button to water every tile at once, and a button to plant one tree anywhere on a grassy tile), but sometimes you'll get tickets!

There are two types of tickets - normal tickets and golden tickets! I haven't had much luck with the one Golden Ticket I got - it just gave me more boosters (and once you hit 50+ of the same booster, getting more boosters is not that thrilling), but I know it can get you other things, like new skins for your tiles!

I actually wound up getting rewarded with a Cactus skin for my plants, so now my foxes eat cactus fruits when it rains! I got that as a level bonus for collecting a certain amount of animals :)

Battle Mango did a great job on this game, and it's cute and fun, so if you're looking for a feel-good game, definitely check out Pocket Forest!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 238: Mergical

Mergical by Betta Games

I love the concept of Merge games. It's basically Marie-Kondoing a game board and there's something wonderful about that feeling of gratification when you've consolidated dozens of similar items down to a few disparate things spread much further apart. You feel like you're cleaning, but you don't get as overwhelmed as if you were cleaning, say, a hoarder's house...

Anyway, that's all a long-winded way of me letting you know that I've been playing Mergical, a mobile game by Betta Games.

And yes, weird dolls are an important part of this game.

Mergical is a lot like Merge Dragons in a lot of ways. You merge groups of 3 together, you're unlocking parts of an island covered in clouds, you're healing land, you're collecting currencies and magic power, etc, etc. Instead of collecting and merging dragons, however, you collect and merge... people. Not sure how to feel about that. Especially since you merge dolls to get people.

Are they golems?

Am I summoning actual people who are desperate to escape?

Am I a monster?

Whatever's going on, you want to match things in groups of three, and you want to do it a lot.

I mean, this is only a couple of unlocks into the game. If it was zoomed out, it could feel overwhelming.

So far, I've only unlocked two or three sections of island, but it's enough to give me a feel, I think, for how this game plays.

Here's the good:

• The graphics are adorable - everything looks good and cute!
• The clouds are precious little hearts!
• Items progress in a way that seems to make a lot of sense (fruit tree seeds > fruit tree saplings > fruit trees > apple trees > pear trees)
• Your helpers respond when you drag and drop them or when you double tap an item for them to collect
• The challenge levels (which are located in the bottom left corner) are quite reasonable (so far)
• The "quests" (located on the left hand side) are fairly straightforward and not impossible without spending real money
• The game is very generous with its rewards, granting you gifts for time spent in-game, specific in-game tasks, and more.

But there are some problems:

• Items don't like to be told where to go - sometimes I'll tap on something to move it and it won't go where I say, other times I'll brush by something to move the screen and an item will move where I don't want it.
• It's very limited gameplay so far
• It's easy to get overwhelmed with so many items in one place
• It takes a very, very long time for seeds to sprout on their own.
• For some reason, this game wants permission to make calls from my phone. That's a big no-no, Betta Games. Fix that. It's not okay or cool. It shouldn't ever have a reason to ask that.

If they can ditch the incredibly nosy permissions they ask for, I would unreservedly suggest this as a game for your younger kids (even with some cash shop items available - just don't give your phone access to your finances and they can't charge these things to you).

6/10, could be a lot of fun.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC