Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: Minimal Sound: Minimal Originality: 9/10 Overall: 8/10

Play at: http://np.ironhelmet.com

Neptune’s Pride is a multiplayer, real-time strategy game with the emphases on “real,” and “strategy,” and a heavy dose of diplomacy. Whereas Starcraft and its ilk unfold at a breakneck pace and stress reaction time and memorization of effective development sequences, Neptune’s Pride is slow-paced, maddeningly so… and that’s what makes it brilliant.

Starting from a small number of stars and a handful of ships, the players seek to expand their territory and vie for dominance of the galaxy. This is not remotely original. What makes it special is that space travel is slow, as it’s meant to be. Of course, your fleets, even with starting technology, still travel at physically impossible speeds, measured in light years per day. But compared to most so-called “real time” games, where events happen on the scale of seconds, sending your fleet to a “nearby” star and seeing an ETA of 8, or 12, or 14 hours is a very different feeling.

The graphics and sound are extremely minimal, too, just simple dots to represent stars, chevrons for fleets, and lines for plotted trajectories. There is a pretty nebula in the background, but that can be turned off for those seeking the ultimate in stripped-down experiences.

You’d expect that a game paced so slowly would take advantage of the added time to allow players to do more of the fussy micro-management that characterizes many other “4X” (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy games, but in fact, Neptune’s Pride goes completely to the other end of the spectrum. Most of the time, there’s really very little to be done except wait.

If one has the cash, stars can be upgraded in terms of Economy (cash production), Industry (ship production) or Science (technology production). However, cash is only paid out once every 24 hours, and one is generally wise to invest most of it as soon as possible. Fleets can be moved around, but as stated earlier, they take hours or days to arrive at their destination, and cannot be redirected in mid-trip. Moreover, waypoints can be set, so that one can plan a multi-leg journey in advance, and let the fleet plod along on its own. Finally, one can switch one’s area of technological research; the four options are Weapons, Range (that is, the distance that one’s ships can travel in a single jump), Speed and Scanning. That is all there is to it - three stats per star, one per fleet (number of ships is all that matters), and four kinds of technology.

Despite all this, for the entire course of my first game, I found myself compulsively logging in about once every two hours. And, in fact, I came to the conclusion that doing so was instrumental in my victory. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, one’s visibility is limited to a certain distance from one’s occupied stars, as determined by one’s level of Scanning technology. Especially in the early middle game, when players’ expanding borders first make contact with each other, it’s critical to take a look around frequently, to see if any potential enemy ships have entered scanning range.

Secondly, and more importantly, Neptune’s Pride is a game of communication and diplomacy. Battles are a straightforward numerical comparison, with no luck involved and the advantage going to the defender. Thus, it’s very difficult to make headway in a one-on-one confrontation. Rather, the game places an emphasis on strategic alliances, persuasion, sharing of information and, of course, betrayal. Although a single fleet may take half a day to make a single jump to an adjacent star, the ramifications of that jump may involve several players, and may necessitate several exchanges of in-game messages in order to avoid (or instigate) a war. Thus, the players who log in most frequently have the most opportunity to communicate with one another, and therefore have an advantage compared to players who plan their movements for the coming day and then don’t log in for another 24 hours.

Someone over at RPS mentioned Neptune’s Pride in passing, in an article about another game. He brought it up as part of a list of games that he says he wishes the gaming media were giving more coverage. I found it funny, because I’d been thinking for a while about making a blog post about it, but I know exactly why it’s not covered very much.

The reason why I was waiting, and the reason few people have written about Neptune’s Pride, is that any respectable journalist wants to give a game a fair shake before writing anything about it. For a multiplayer game, that implies playing at least one full game… but in the case of Neptune’s Pride, that can take a week or more. That’s a big time commitment for a game reviewer who has new titles showing up for review on a daily basis.

So, now, I’ve finished (and won, I’m proud to say) my first game of Neptune’s Pride, and I think I can now assess it fairly.

First of all, and most importantly, it’s a fun game. From beginning to end, there will be plenty of tense moments, watching your fleets inch their way across the void, worrying about whether a larger enemy fleet is hovering just beyond the range of one’s scanners, negotiating for much-needed support from a neighbour of dubious character…

Also important, from my point of view, it’s a good example of minimalism in game design, as I discussed in my post Density, not Volume. I can think of a few flourishes that probably wouldn’t hurt the game, but I definitely can’t think of anything else that could be taken away. The mechanics of the game take only minutes to grasp fully, but have pretty deep implications.

One thing that’s sorely lacking is email alerts. The game reminds you once per day that it’s still going on, and that you’ve had your daily paycheque come in and should log in to spend it… but other than that, you simply have to log in to see what’s going on. Having an option to turn on alerts for e.g. new ships coming into scanning range, battles being fought, etc. would help immensely, especially for those who work 9-5 jobs and can’t be logging in constantly.

Another addition I’d like to see is some sort of numerical player ranking, similar to an ELO rating in chess. Aside from pleasing those with competitive natures, like myself, it would serve the important function of keeping losing players in the game - if finishing in 6th place resulted in less loss of rating than finishing 8th, players with no hope of taking 1st would be given an incentive to keep struggling, and looking for alliances with stronger players. As it is, my experience in my game was that only one losing player kept going until the end - everyone else, once crippled, either simply stopped playing and was placed under AI administration after 48 hours of inactivity, or began “donating” all their stars and fleets to whichever opponent they hated the least, or whichever was most likely to hurt the one who’d attacked them.

Although I love this game, and I’m glad someone made it, I have grave doubts about its possibilities for financial success. I’m a big fan of the micropayment model, and that’s how Neptune’s Pride works - you can play small, standard games for free, or buy credits to play in larger and/or custom games. Joining someone else’s custom game costs the equivalent of $1, while creating one’s own is $2. These are reasonable prices, and in fact, I doubt many people would pay more than that for a single game of anything, especially not something as minimalist as Neptune’s Pride.

The problem, however, is that the game’s innovation is also its probable financial downfall. It simply takes too long to play. Most gamers these days lose interest in a new game after a week or two, if that. That’s how long it takes for someone to get through their first free game. Even those who like the free trial enough to by credits will probably get their fix after only one or two games, and not buy any more credits. Given that some of the larger games could go on for over a month, even the most dedicated users will only be netting the site maybe $10-15 a year, which is a low subscription fee by any standard.

Furthermore, I suspect that many players will not get the strategy right away… and given the game’s slow pace, the trial-and-error method of strategy formulation adopted by most players will take too long to get them there. Many will simply decide that they’re not good at the game, and abandon it early. As for me, I learned a lot in the course of just one play through. I’ll do my part in helping this game’s chances of success by posting a strategy guide tomorrow, with tips to help first-time players. It may seem a little pretentious to be making assertions about “correct” strategy after only playing a game once, but I doubt many people have played two or more full games, and we all know what they say about one-eyed men in the Land of the Blind.

Gameplay: 5/10 Graphics: 4/10 Sound: 7/10 Originality: 7/10 Overall: 5/10

Available for download direct from Sinister Design.

When I saw this game mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun, I went straight to the creator’s website and bought it, without even trying the demo. This is an indicator of how much I loved the concept. It’s a turn-based, top-down, tactical battle game. Turn-based games in general are a sadly-neglected genre these days, especially turn-based strategy games. Even within the genre, Telepath Psy Arena 2 is unusual in that it does away with randomness - attacks always hit, and always deal a fixed amount of damage. Characters are persistent from one mission to the next, and death is permanent. Although it’s easy enough to purchase a replacement for a slain ally, all the money invested in training the character is lost, and it can take a while to get the replacement’s power up to par with the rest of the team.

There’s a lot to love in that concept, and it seems like a recipe for success. Unfortunately, the game does almost everything else wrong.

For one thing, the game is riddled with balance issues. The player’s characters have much higher movement than similar characters on the enemy side, so there’s little challenge in outmaneuvering the enemy. In particular, the Assassin character type can move 9 squares per turn, which is greater than the size of the map in its smaller direction, and quite early on, acquires the Leap ability, which extends the character’s movement range as well as allowing it to pass over friends, enemies and some obstacles. Combined with its ability to deal massive damage when striking from behind, investing a heap of money into an Assassin’s strength attribute (boosting attack damage) allows an insta-kill of almost any one enemy per turn, anywhere on the map.

The creator would probably argue that the Assassin’s offensive capability is balanced by its relatively weak defense, and that moving it far from the rest of the player characters to kill a distant enemy is likely to result in the Assassin being killed, but this leads us to my next major complaint about the game, which is that it’s infinitely grindable.

Any battle can be replayed multiple times. I’m not sure whether there’s a limit to how many times, since the game does seem to keep track of how many times you’ve beaten a given battle. It’s irrelevant in any case, as the game also allows you to fight battles against random assortments of enemies of whatever difficulty level you like. This sounds like a nice feature, but the problem is that it means that, rather than forming a better strategy in order to get past a difficult level, the player need merely spend an hour raking in cash by beating up on easier foes, and buy his way to victory by upgrading his characters.

The reason for the inclusion of this feature is obvious - if the player had to progress through a series of ever more difficult battles, without being able to engage in optional ones to earn money, then there would inevitably be a moment of Pyrrhic victory, in which the player’s team would be left so crippled that the subsequent battle would be unwinnable. This feature is not a good solution, however - aside from the above problem, it also means that character death punishes the player, not by having fewer assets at his disposal for the next battle, but by forcing him into a long series of boring, repetitive, easy battles in order to purchase and train a replacement. This is not good game design.

Technically speaking, the game is amateurishly programmed. There is little animation or special effects, and nothing in the gameplay should require much processor power, and yet the game crawls. Part of the blame probably lies with Adobe, as the game is written in AIR, and I’ve found that ActionScript in general runs poorly on Mac. Nonetheless, I’ve seen plenty of more elaborate ActionScript games that have run smoothly, so I’m positive that a more talented programmer would have been able to make this game perform well.

All of this could be forgiven, if the game’s most important aspect had been given more attention. I am referring to the AI.

If you make a game single-player, turn-based and luck free, you’re committing yourself to writing a strong AI opponent. Simply pitting the player against ever-stronger, but equally stupid opposition is fine for an action game, but it feels cheap in the context of a strategy game. Imagine purchasing a chess game, and discovering that increasing the difficulty simply gave the computer more queens, rather than having it make better moves.

Without having seen the game’s code, I nonetheless have a pretty good idea of what sort of decision-making it employs: first, it checks if it can kill any of the player’s characters. If so, it always does so. If not, then it attacks the one with the fewest hit points remaining. If it can’t attack anyone, then it simply moves one square in a more-or-less random direction. Enemy characters with healing abilities always default to using those, rather than attacking, unless there are no injured allies in range. It never makes any attempt to keep its characters’ backs covered, either, which simply increases the power of the Assassin character. This extremely predictable, simplistic behaviour on the part of the opponents makes the battles rather tedious.

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone buy this game. It would certainly be worth a download if it were a freeware title, which is what it feels like, but it isn’t executed in a professional enough manner to be worth the price tag, low as it is ($12.99). Those craving a challenging, turn-based strategy experience would be better off checking out Battle for Wesnoth, which is actually free, and open source. Meanwhile, game developers thinking about making such a title can learn two important things from Telepath Psy Arena 2 - firstly, they can learn from its mistakes, and secondly, my immediate and unhesitating purchase of it should confirm that there is a market for such games, and that it’s woefully under-served at the moment.

Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: 7/10 Sound: 7/10 Originality: 9/10 Overall: 8/10

Available for download on Greenhouse or direct from the developer (Broken Rules).

I bought And Yet It Moves without knowing anything about it, for four reasons. Firstly, it’s available for sale on Greenhouse, which is a site that I’ve learned to trust in terms of game selection; in general, they carry only indie games with good gameplay, and which are innovative in some way. Secondly, it’s priced at $9.99 instead of the ubiquitous $19.99 that most game developers seem to regard as an immutable fact of the industry. Thirdly, the logo is cool, and I’m a design nerd. Finally, I’ve been neglecting the blog for the past couple of weeks, and I figured I was about due for another review.

The game has turned out to be a very pleasant surprise in most ways, though technologically problematic for my outdated PowerPC Mac. The first thing one notices about it is the unique graphical style; the world is constructed out irregular chunks of photographs with torn paper edges, while the player character is a sketchy black and white line drawing. It’s a simple and aesthetically pleasing style, especially when seen in motion and suits the gameplay well. I think a lot of its charm comes from its originality, however; like the whole silhouettes thing (e.g. this and this and this), I’ll get tired of it quickly if others start emulating it.

The gameplay is likewise quite original. You move your little pencil-drawing character around with the WASD control scheme familiar to most players of indie action games; in this case, S is not used, but A and D are used to move left and right, while W jumps. The pace of the character’s movement seems quite sluggish compared to most platform games, but this is intentional, and necessary due to the other half of the gameplay, which would be overwhelming if the character moved at a more normal speed; using the arrow keys, you can rotate the entire world around the character, in increments of 90 degrees, allowing you to make turn floors into walls, walls into ceilings, and holes into tunnels, as well as making strange, loopy jumps possible.

At first glance, this mechanic seems equivalent to simply rotating the world’s gravity, and the camera along with it. This is not the case, however, as the character’s velocity is preserved relative to the screen, and not the world. Thus, when rotating the world, you’re also changing your character’s trajectory within it. This is helpful in some ways - allowing you to make 90 degree turns in mid-jump - but dangerous in others; in particular, it means that you’re always accelerating when in freefall… once travelling at sufficient speed for impact to be fatal, there’s no way of slowing yourself down for a safe landing.

Fortunately, checkpoints are abundant, and generally placed right after a particularly tough challenge, so you rarely have to repeat a frustrating part of a level after you’ve passed it once. Although some challenges rely on timing, reflexes and fine control, the majority are more puzzle-like in nature, requiring you to figure out the rules certain objects obey, and how to manipulate the world to take advantage of them. For instance, at one point, your path is barred by a (photograph of a) gorilla. Nearby, a tree produces bananas… but the bananas become bruised when striking a surface, and splatter after a few rough landings. Of course, the gorilla is at the far end of a small labyrinth, so you must attempt to rotate the world such that the banana falls cleanly through the labyrinth without striking the walls or floor, finally reaching the gorilla and convincing him to move out of your way.

Each level has its own theme or central mechanic in this way, and rarely are they reused. If, for instance, lighting things on fire is the key to one level, there will be several variations on that idea within the level, but you might never see it again in subsequent levels. This keeps the gameplay fresh, and makes you curious to see what’s coming next. It’s made possible by the graphical simplicity of the game; in games with more traditional art, the cost of producing art assets is such that a one-time gimmick or sprite is a luxury that can rarely be afforded - generally only in the game’s climactic moments.

This economical art style is presumably also the reason that the game is priced at $9.99 instead of the usual $19.99. Through their clever idea, the developers have managed to produce an entertaining game that can be sold at an even more affordable price than most indie offerings, without looking cheap. Of course, as an freelance artist myself, I wouldn’t like it became the norm for developers to come up with gimmicks to all-but-eliminate the need for an art budget, but as a consumer, it’s certainly nice to get something cool-looking for half the usual price.

My primary complaint about the game is with its performance on my PowerPC-based Mac. Even on the lowest graphical settings, the game slows to a crawl if it isn’t allowed to monopolize my system’s resources. I imagine this isn’t a problem for PC users and owners of Intel-based Macs, but if you’re using an older Mac and are contemplating buying the game, it’s something to consider. Also, a bug in one of the early levels caused the game to hang - however, the tech support guy at Broken Rules answered my query quickly, assuring me that it’s a bug that only occurs on PPC Macs, that it will be fixed in the next release, and providing me with a way to unlock the next level so as to skip the problem for the time being.

And Yet It Moves is a good example of a game which is artsy without being an “art game,” and a successful experiment in unusual mechanics that turn out to be a lot of fun. Even my less gaming-inclined friends have said they like watching the game over my shoulder, as the visuals are so interesting, and the gameplay delightfully vertiginous, especially played at full screen. At its low price-point, I would call it a must-have for anyone with a PC or Intel-based Mac, and still worth the technological frustration even for PPC Mac users.

Quebec-based game developer Citérémis has just released their first game, Aztaka. This is by far the biggest computer game project I’ve been involved with - the game was written entirely in French, and I was brought in a few months before release to translate all the game text into English. I’ll also be coordinating any other volunteer translators to localize the game for other countries - so far, we have a German and a Portuguese translator, but if any translators of other languages are reading this and want to help, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

You can download a free demo and/or purchase the full game at the company’s website: http://aztaka.citeremis.com

Aztaka is a side-scrolling adventure/RPG set in the world of Aztec mythology. The player takes on the role of Huitzilo, son of the Sun God. Accompanied by his friend Ayopha, who has been turned into a hummingbird by Huitzilo’s evil sister, Huitzilo seeks to gather the Seven Ancient Phonograms, which will open the gateway to the Path of the Gods, thereby freeing his people from an era of darkness and bloodshed.

Central to the game’s mechanics is the idea of manipulating spiritual energy. This energy appears onscreen as a globule of light, generally after slaying an enemy. It comes in different forms, and can be manipulated with the mouse (while Huitzilo’s movements are controlled with the keyboard). The different forms of energy have different powers, and can, for instance, heal injured characters, or cause platforms to appear in order to give Huitzilo access to areas that were once out of reach.

One of the game’s biggest selling points is its amazing art quality. Citérémis set out to create a visually stunning product, and they came through in spades with Aztaka. For reasons of budget and efficiency, most side-scrolling games rely heavily on tiles for terrain and background - although clever level design can conceal the repetitiveness to an extent, it’s still intrinsic to the genre. By contrast, Aztaka’s backgrounds consist of huge, beautiful landscape paintings, with several levels of parallax and little or no repetition. The character animations are likewise extremely fluid and realistic.

Aztaka is impressive by any standard, but especially so as the company’s first release. So many independent developers bite off more than they can chew for their first project, and it’s rare to see such an ambitious project reach completion. It was a great pleasure to work with Citérémis on Aztaka, and I hope the game will do well, and that they’ll involve me in their future projects.

Gameplay: 7/10 Graphics: 7/10 Sound: 8/10 Originality: 10/10 Overall: 8/10

“Cheer up, dear friend, or they may come, and take you where the glum is from.”

So begins this enjoyable adventure in weirdness. The meaning of the phrase becomes clear in the first scene, in which you, the protagonist, slink along in your raincoat, clearly miserable, while the children dance and play in the rain around you. As you slog slowly across the screen, a shadowy version of yourself appears in the background and opens a dark doorway in space, which sucks you in to a strange, surreal and dreary world - presumably where glum is from.

After that, you’re more or less on your own. The game occasionally gives you hints about how to do simple, commonplace things, like passing through a portal, but other than that, you’re left to discover what you’re supposed to be trying to do, and how, on your own. If the challenges themselves were difficult, once understood, the lack of explanation could be construed as unfair, but here, it’s the whole point of the game. Although it’s essentially a platformer, minimal reflexes are required. Nor is conventional logic going to help you solve the puzzles; what’s required in Glum Buster is patience, an inquisitive spirit, and the willingness to suspend disbelief.

At a loss for how to explain what the game’s like without actually spoiling one of the puzzles, I finally decided that I would just have to invent one, in what I feel is close to the game designer’s spirit. Imagine you’re the raincoat-clad protagonist and, having spent the last few levels floating in a void, you’ve finally found yourself in a place that has some semblance of gravity, in a high-walled valley with no apparent escape, featureless except for a lamppost and a dead tree. A shadowy bee buzzes around, and incongruously placed on the highest bough of the tree is a flower pot. You can’t reach the flower pot, nor can you seem to hurt the bee, who follows you wherever you go and kills you if he catches you.

At first, you have no idea what to do, until you notice that the bee isn’t always following you. Sometimes he moves away briefly. Confused, you roam the screen, keeping an eye on him, until you realize that it’s whenever you pass through the beam of light cast by the lamp that the bee turns around and moves the other way. Figuring all these strange objects must be connected, and because you can’t reach the flower pot yourself, you decide to try to maneuver the bee into it, by alternately attracting and repelling it by moving in and out of the light. After a few attempts you succeed, whereupon the shadowy bee grows, and changes into a glowing bird, which alights on the ground and allows you to ride it. You soar up and over the valley wall, and on to… some equally bizarre scenario.

I don’t think this game would do very well as a commercial title, but as a freeware art piece, it’s much more fun than most, and definitely evokes the dreamlike feel that was the author’s stated goal - “a collection of my daydreams, for your daydreams.” Although I didn’t rate it particularly highly in terms of graphics and sound, this is simply because they’re minimalist, and neither great nor terrible by objective standards - as far as the game’s feel goes, they’re just about perfect. My only complaint in terms of mood is actually the name of the game itself; the term “buster” suggests to me a more colorful and action-oriented game, rather than this slow-paced and moody art piece.

In terms of the gameplay, my biggest complaint is the complete lack of help up front. Although figuring out what to do is the whole fun of the game, at least knowing how to control your character would have avoided some frustration up front. At the very least, I would have liked to know that I was meant to be using both the mouse and the keyboard; as only the keyboard is used in the introduction sequence, I took the blue jewel-like mouse cursor to be an interactive object, not part of the interface. After ten minutes of trying unsuccessfully to solve the first level, I was about to quit, until I moved the mouse by mistake and realized what I was looking at. Once I knew that I could move around with the arrow keys and interact with the environment and enemies by left and right clicking on things, I was happy to figure everything else out on my own… but I might have missed out on this neat little game entirely if I had never realized that the mouse was used anywhere other than the menus.

The game is apparently short - about five hours of gameplay is what I’ve heard, though I’ve probably only played for one or two - but it is effectively free, so you don’t have to take that into consideration when deciding whether to play it. The actual revenue model is what the author terms “charityware,” meaning that he’s depending on donations, and will donate an ever-increasing portion of the proceeds to charity, about 50% at first, and a larger percentage the more donations he gets. Since donations are entirely optional, I highly recommend giving this game a try; you might not play all the way through, but I imagine the imagery will speak to most players on some level. If you do decide to pay something for it, you can of course feel good in the knowledge that you’re helping both a talented hobbyist developer and some sort of charitable cause.

Gameplay: 9/10  Graphics: 8/10  Sound: 6/10  Originality: 8/10  Overall: 8/10

Play at: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/486608

Bloody fun, indeed! This is one of the best Flash games I’ve played to date. Although the game’s description on Newgrounds makes it sound like a mediocre action game, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, Bloody Fun Day is a fairly abstract puzzle/strategy game in which you play the Grim Reaper, harvesting four colours of “Cuties,” in an attempt to score as many points as possible before your energy runs out. It is amazingly addictive and challenging, and the mechanics are satisfyingly elegant from a game designer’s perspective.

The game is played on a hexagonal grid, initially full of randomly-placed Cuties, with you at the centre. Each turn, you move one hex in any direction, reaping the Cutie found there, as well as any contiguous Cuties of the same colour. The spaces you move through are left barren, while any additional Cuties reaped leave eggs behind. You cannot move through barren spaces, and although you can reap eggs, it is undesirable to do so, as you lose points, and will have fewer Cuties to reap later.

After a certain number of turns (initially 4), all eggs hatch into new Cuties of random colours, while new eggs appear on any formerly barren tiles. After a few of these life cycles, the game progresses to a new level, in which the eggs take progressively longer to hatch, increasing the game’s difficulty.

The challenge of the game comes in the form of a time limit. You begin the game with 20 energy points, and each move you make reduces this by one. When you reach zero, the game is over.

Fortunately, each of the four colours of Cuties helps you to prolong your lifespan (err, deathspan?) in a different way. The most important are the red Cuties, each of which increases your energy by one point. The other three colours allow you to use special powers.

You have six different powers at your disposal, two for each colour - blue, yellow and black. As you harvest Cuties of each colour, the corresponding power meters fill; once one is full, you may use the corresponding power. Examples of powers include leaping over a single space, or randomly changing the colour of a group of Cuties.

As a final twist, harvesting a group of ten or more Cuties results in one of their eggs being golden. Reaping the Golden Egg gives a huge point reward, but you must do so before the end of the current hatching cycle, or else it will simply hatch into a Cutie like any other egg. The creation and reaping of Golden Eggs provides a number of interesting strategic dilemmas, especially as you have no control over exactly where in the group the egg will appear.

A round of Bloody Fun Day takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and it’s impossible not to want to start a new game as soon as the previous one is finished. Although it’s easy early on to romp around, harvesting Cuties willy-nilly, the decisions become increasingly difficult as the hatching time increases; by the end of the game, decisions can be agonizing indeed; use a power now, or save it for the next hatching cycle? Go for red Cuties and prolong the game, or go for a Golden Egg and leave yourself critically short of energy?

Although the deep and elegant gameplay is the main appeal of the game, the graphics are of very high quality by Flash game standards as well. The Cuties are indeed cute, and the game benefits from a mixture of crisp pixel art for the play area and clean-and-simple vector graphics for the GUI.

There is only one music track, and it gets annoying very quickly, but this is a common problem for Flash games, where keeping the file size small is a priority. In any case, the music can be turned off, so this is a minor gripe.

There are two things I would like to see in a sequel. First would be a single level of Undo - multiple levels would be prone to abuse, but it’s not uncommon to misclick, use the wrong power by mistake, or harvest a large group of Cuties before realizing that your power meters for that colour were already maxed out. For these cases, a simple Undo would be a real blessing. The second would be a fixed puzzle mode, in which the player must find a way to reap a whole grid of Cuties with a limited supply of energy.

With those two additions, a little visual polish, and a better soundtrack, this could easily be a competitive title in the casual downloadable arena. Seeing as it’s free and doesn’t require a download, I highly recommend giving this game a try immediately!