Friday, July 11, 2014

Taki Tori 2+: a chicken without a home

So cute, yet so lost and pointless
It is my belief that a tight and coherent rule set is essential for worthwhile interactive entertainment. The beauty of games - digital and otherwise - is that they create  worlds where complexity, objectives, and laws can be set to anything. For these worlds to be satisfying the player needs to be able to interact with them in a meaningful way. Beyond the rules, the world itself has to be a place where the player wants to spend their time. The world needs to peak their desire to explore, to master, or to understand. Typically I find the former task is the key stumbling block of most games. Sometimes both pieces - mechanics and setting - are a problem. But, the failure of Toki Tori 2+, surprised me with being a peculiar kind of world building failure. 

Toki Tori 2+ is smartly done game. It is part of the proud platformer tradition. The art is charming. There is a fresh conceit of the player character being under-powered (basically the Hodor of the baby chick world) unable to even jump. Instead of typical mechanics the player has to depend on calling friendly creatures towards themselves or shoving the critters away. The puzzles increment smartly with new mechanics introduced slowly and multiple variations of each mechanic explored. 

And yet, the game is not fun. Me not having fun is hardly a cause for alarm as I am a hateful and joyless creature. But I also have trouble imagining a better adjustment human enjoying this game. For the strange place where Toki Tori 2+ fails is in defining an audience - the sort of people that might want to spend time interacting with this smartly constructed world. The game is too simple and dull for the PG-13+ crowd and and too finicky for the Y crowd.  

The puzzles are very straightforward - never did a I look at a situation and wonder what it is that is expected of me. Yet executing the solution can be quite finicky with precise timings and spacing that the player can't intuit. There is never a penalty for getting a puzzle wrong as all the elements reset and death is hardly an impediment thanks to frequent check points.Those with somewhat formed pre-frontal cortexes will alternate boredom with brief bouts of frustration. Those precious ones with still growing logic centers will get frustrated as their actions can result in highly variant results which make it difficult to make sense of cause and effect. 

If only the chicken knew who it was trying to make friends with. 

Overall: It took me a little while before I realized I hated it. 5/10

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