52 IN 52: Tadpole Treble cleared

Before you ask: Yes, I am running through a chunk of short games to round myself off. As much as I know it's not necessary, I want to finish this before the new year, because I have ideas and thoughts and I want to complete this instead of trying to juggle two "full year" things at once.

That said: I'm glad I picked this to gun through, and will absolutely be coming back to it.

When I was playing through it, I was very definitely getting a pretty solid Harmoknight vibe out of it - the goals are simple. Dodge rocks (and debris, and things that might want to eat you), collect bubbles and sparkles. Smack round cymbal-like objects and bamboo poles with your tail. It's fairly forgiving for a rhythm action game (You can take something like five or six hits in most cases - more on that "most" later - and health pickups are pretty frequent) which is probably a good thing since the entire game gets very very clogged, very very fast. It's a completionist's nightmare, but what rhythm game isn't?

That said, the game is not without its faults, and most of the faults in this game are vore. (Yes, I said it. No, I'm not taking it back.) That is to say, your tadpole isn't alone in the world and a whole lot of things want to eat it, particularly in later stages.

Being eaten is generally fatal.

And these songs can go from 3 to 4 minutes, with the lethal nomming coming halfway through, or in one stage's case, at the literal end of the song if you didn't do good enough. Thankfully it's not as frequent as I make it sound, but it's still a few fractions of a point docked. A few more get docked for the controls being not quite as precise as I would've liked - more often than not I'd find myself overcompensating trying to get something and eating a hit.

It's still one of my favorite games from this 52.

Part of this is very likely due to the soundtrack. Music is the most important part of any rhythm game, and it can make or break a game. In this case, it very, very much made it. (Click that link; it's one of the later stages, but it's also one of the best songs in the game, if not the best.) It's also very aesthetically cohesive and maybe I'm a bit charmed by the art style. (There's a reason for that, too - turns out the game was headed by the guy who did Brawl in the Family, way back when.)

It's a generally short game - again, I'm trying to tackle the nibbles as opposed to going for the big fish - but it's a rhythm game, and those are meant to be revisited. I'm revisiting this, rest assured. ♥

52 IN 52: Draw Puzzle cleared

Technically this one wasn't a "short" clear, but it's one I've been plugging at since I grabbed it off chrono.gg about a month ago. Those of you who have talked with me about puzzle games at any length know that I prefer the more "puzzle book" type of games like Picross or Sudoku clumps over the story-based puzzling of adventure games or Myst-likes, if for no other reason than "if I get stumped, I can just walk away and come back a few years later without any worry of 'what the hell was I just doing'".

I'm not actually sure what this kind of puzzle is officially called. (Are there standardized names for puzzles? I know back when Games Magazine was a thing, people took those names as standard, but magazines have been a dead medium for a decade or more, no matter how much Game Informer wants to push a subscription onto me.) The closest I can find is "Link-a-Pix", though it's shown up in phone games as "PathPix" and "Fill-a-Pix" too, or, obviously, "Draw Puzzle". Draw Puzzle is the most unintuitive name ever, for the record. Yes, it is a puzzle! Drawing may be required in the most vague definition of drawing, in that you make lines and art comes out. (Well. "art". Actual pictures with detail and quality are reserved for the bigger multi-part megapuzzles - think the equivalent of the Picross e "Micross" mode - and our normal game mode is 25x25 at max.)

Either way, this is a game where you have colored pairs of numbers on a grid. Say you have two sixes; that means that a six-square line starts at one of the sixes and ends at the other. The trick is getting these lines to coil and loop and turn around each other without crossing or leaving empty squares. You know, your typical puzzle-book type grid puzzle. Technically they have it available on the Puzzler World games, too.

This isn't too bad, difficulty-wise, for a puzzle book. It's easy enough to get into a rhythm where you can generally get a feel of where you can go, and again, the game only gives puzzles to you at a max of 25x25 at a time. (The site I linked above goes up to 150x150, which I would probably die before I finished.) As of such, just based on ease of access, I'd say Draw Puzzle is a decent springboard for beginners.

Problem is... Well. The pictures violently vary in quality. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of these are just forum avatars or gamer tags. They are easy puzzles but that does not necessarily make them "good". (Those of you who play the Picross games that Nintendo releases may object that a lot of their smaller puzzles aren't great either, but at least those I never felt like someone was having a joke that I did not get.)

Still, I got it for a buck, and it's five normally. There's enough here content-wise, if that's your thing. And it's got the ability to make your own and/or share them on the Workshop, so there's that.