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We’ve had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.

Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It’s a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn’t hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.

First, let’s talk about the kind of gameplay that’s in Tweet Land. You control a car heading down the highway (Route 140 no less) and you must make it to the finish line while dodging tweet-driven hazards and other traffic on the road. You can veer into the other cars from the side to knock them off the road and score some points, and ramming multiple cars off the road at once will multiply the points you earn. If you hit cars from behind or run into road hazards, you lose a bit of life, which is represented by the visual damage on your car.

I really like Tweet Land’s retro style, and there is a lot of humor and personality in its pixel art visuals (though it’s kind of blurry on my iPhone 4S). But things start to fall apart when you actually start playing. The controls are very slippery, and it’s hard to be precise when trying to properly ram other cars or avoid hitting hazards. With practice you can get used to it, but it’s still really annoying when you’re trying to quickly react to something and the controls don’t afford you the kind of finesse that you need to get it done.

I think when you have games that are built on top of a very simple core gameplay concept, you have to get all the little details right. That’s why games like Jetpack Joyride or Angry Birds are often imitated but rarely duplicated. as they get the feel of the controls and the movement in the game so right. If you’re going to be doing the same action over and over again, you want that action to be fun. While Tweet Land has its share of fun moments, something about it just feels off, like it’s missing something but I can’t pinpoint what.

The game is broken into two environments with 12 levels each, with a spot for a third environment that’s said to be coming soon. With each new level, new tweet-driven elements are introduced and added to the current ones, so as you keep going the variety of things that can happen increases quite a bit. An example of a hazard would be if someone tweets the word “meteor” then a meteor will fly in from off screen and you’ll have to use the position of its shadow in order to avoid being crushed. There are helpful things that can be triggered in the game too, like health packs or a temporary spread shot for your vehicle.

One problem with the progression in Tweet Land is that it gets rather hard rather quickly, and if you get stuck on a level there’s no moving forward until you beat it. This got pretty frustrating since many of the times that I died it felt like it wasn’t actually my fault. When elements are brought in from Twitter, they are accompanied by a label with the Twitter handle of whoever tweeted that keyword. This is neat, but leads to an incredibly cluttered and distracting screen, especially when there are multiple things happening at once. Coupled with the floaty controls and the speed at which things are zooming by, and the odds are stacked against you.

Arrows indicate where things will be coming in from off screen, but they’re hard to notice amongst the busyness on the screen and often aren’t very helpful. Add in the fact that there’s usually a ton of traffic on the road with you, and making it to the finish line intact can require a healthy dose of luck just as much as skill. The levels tend to be a bit longish, and nothing is worse than seeing your cheap demise when you’re within a stone’s throw of the finish. The more I failed a level over and over, the less I felt compelled to go back and conquer it.

However, my biggest issue with Tweet Land is something that I didn’t really expect: the tweets that the game draws from can be much too somber for what is supposed to be a fun and lighthearted game. For example, if someone tweets about a “car crash” then cars will zoom in from offscreen and wreck into some of the other traffic on the road. When your run ends, you have the option of looking at a list of all the tweets that were used to bring things into the game.

To my horror, I found that in this particular instance “car crash” was pulled from a huge retweet campaign trying to raise money for a girl who had lost her parents in a car crash in Florida. I know Tweet Land has no way of telling the difference, but I couldn’t help but feel crass for playing a game that was fueled by somebody else’s tragedy. With some of the other keywords used in the game – like tsunami, terrorist, and death – I have no doubt that encountering a downer situation like that will occur often.

While I do still think the idea behind Tweet Land is incredibly clever, I just find the game too fundamentally flawed to be enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it and I did find myself having fun with the game at times, but those fun times are quickly diminished when you realize your game is possibly being powered by the tragic tweets of strangers. Beyond that, the gameplay is too average to warrant dealing with cheap deaths and an unpredictable difficulty.

With some tweaks to the controls and interface, and perhaps some sort of filter for what kind of keywords are utilized, then Tweet Land could end up being something pretty special. It feels like it’s just a couple notches off of being something great, and I hope it gets there someday. As it is now, though, it’s hard to recommend the game except to those who might be curious to check out its novel use of Twitter or are prepared to deal with its shortcomings.

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It’s 2012, and I’ve had a few years to conjure a snappy explanation of what Eufloria is and how it rolls. I haven’t. So, before I even get into how much I dig it on iPad, I’ll let my main man Rudolf Kremers — one of the handful of dudes behind the original release — do the talking. In our latest “bonus” podcast, he cheekily broke it down like this:

“Eufloria is a game of space, conquest, and exploration based on themes of plant life and flowers rather than space marines and spaceships.”

That’s the thing about Eufloria: it’s an RTS that goes against the grain. It doesn’t have any big dudes in big armor smashing space orcs in the face with apartment-sized space maces. It also doesn’t subscribe to any particular feel or taste, or really, any action-y RTS conventions. It’s a minimalist strategy game that has some cool, laid-back creative touches, and it’s all wrapped up in a sensitive production overhead that conveys the game’s core design ideals and gentle pacing well.

This much has been proven in past iterations. And for the most part, what you’ve seen is what you’ll be getting Day Zero on iPad. Eufloria on iPad still looks gorgeous, it still runs as smooth as ever, and all the little technical touches on the movement, placement and execution phases of the game have made it over. But, on the other hand, I’m not seeing a major adjustment on anything anyone has complained about before — the balance appears to be still a little touch and go, and in some of the levels I’ve been playing, the pacing is brutally, brutally slow.

What the iPad port does bring, though, are new ways to interact more intimately with the experience. Pinch and zoom can be used liberally to explore every little nook and cranny of each level. Satisfying drag, hold, and swipe gestures take care of the rest. It’s all good stuff.

I asked Kremers after the show to explain what he was shooting for with this version’s controls. He said that the main idea was to strip “all barriers between playing the game and the device you play it on.” Mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned. This is appears to be as much of a lean-back experience as ever before, and delightfully so.

Here’s a breakdown for those of you just seeing Eufloria for the first time. This is a game about asteroids, trees, and tiny, winged seedlings. In almost every scenario, the goal is to take these seedlings to an asteroid, build a tree or two, and then usher even more seedlings on to other asteroids. The tech tree is simple: trees build seedlings and asteroids have one of three different effects on seedlings, either making them strong or fast or energetic. As trees age, they become more potent and harder to kill. Eventually you’ll see some variations on unit types as well as a defensive tree that’ll keep enemy seedlings off of your rock.

The strategy factors into the picture in a variety of ways. You can’t hit up an asteroid unless you have an asteroid connected to it. Also, most asteroids are inhabited, so you’ll need to kill the enemy seedlings and then destroy their trees, which are jacked into that asteroid’s core. Cracking the core boils and tearing down an impromptu space settlement boils down to a numbers game: basically, whoever has the larger wad of dudes wins. Much later in the game, you’ll be given very specific tasks, like say, defending or finding a path through a system.

On our show, Kremers explained where these ideas came from. Eufloria proper is based on a proof-of-concept called “Dyson,” which is named after a british physicist who theorized that you could explore space by growing mechanical trees on asteroids. It’s neat to see this crazy idea living on in a game.

The beauty of Eufloria is in its simplicity; it’s artfully stripped of graphical clutter and is fairly bare-boned on the UI and sound front. It’s also strikingly easy to play for a strategy game since most of the action happens on a macro-level: clicks, drags, and drops compose all you’ll need for galactic takeovers. This type of game feels great on iPad, and it seems like Team Eufloria and Tunatech pulled it off.

My time with the preview build, for reasons of avoiding anything other than modest scrutiny at this phase in its pre-release form, has been artificially shortened, so I don’t have a verdict for you. You’ll get that later at some point this month when the game sees a release across iOS at an unannounced price. We’re expecting more details to roll in shortly. Fingers crossed.

All the screens in this write-up are from the PSN version of the game. I can’t tell a difference between the two in picture-form.

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At last year’s Macworld, XMG Studio was showing off Cows vs Aliens [99¢], a game I thoroughly enjoyed when it came out and is still amongst my favorite games. This year, their big upcoming title will be a brand new licensed Ghostbusters game. It’s not really past the concept stage just yet, but the mock artwork and test animation videos I saw are looking pretty sweet.

Ghostbusters will have a heavy social component, as well as some augmented reality gameplay ideas. So, for example, you might wander into Starbucks and get alerted that there’s a ghost on the loose there, and you’ll need to find it using your device’s camera and wrestle it down into one of those fancy traps just like in the movies. Then, you can valiantly hold your device in the air and loudly declare “we came, we saw, we kicked its ass!!” as the entire cafe cheers you on. Or something like that, at least that’s how I’d imagine it going down.

Another upcoming project from XMG is a remake of their incredibly popular Drag Racer: Pro Tuner [Free] series. Drag Racer lets you get super involved with tricking out a vehicle with tons of customization options, from cosmetic stuff to performance improvements, and then you get to take your ride to the streets and compete against other players and their cars. The new version will feature completely redone visuals and a nice UI overhaul, which the team tells me is something they’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Finally, if there are any teenagers in your life, then they might get a kick out of the just released Totally Amp’d! [Free]. XMG has enlisted some actual established actors to create 10 episodes to play through, which let you do things like create your own music videos, record your own songs, and come up with your very own fashion designs for characters in the game. The production values are through the roof in Totally Amp’d!, and you can check out the first episode for free with the remaining episodes available as a $4.99 in-app purchase.

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What happens when three visionaries get together and tease an awesome game? You get The Other Brothers, which is a game that certainly has the look and style of a next-level iOS game. On the other hand, you also get almost nothing in the Fine Details Department, and that’s a monumental bummer considering the promise on display. I mean, just look at that.

The first post on the game’s new blog describes The Other Brothers as “a pixelated family fun adventure [game] of running, jumping, collecting, racing against the clock …” with a suitably mysterious twist. A Kotaku post has some more concept-y type of art if you’d like to see a lot more than what’s on display in this post. We’re on a mission to get a lot more details, so definitely stay tuned.

[Via Kotaku]

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Did you know that penguins spend up to 75% of their time underwater, looking for food in the ocean? Or, if Chillingo’s recent Greedy Penguins [99¢/Lite] is to be believed, they spend 85% of their time on ice floes, waiting for you to feed them, 10% of their time playing guitar and burping, and 5% of their time getting eaten by ravenous Orcas.

Greedy Penguins is a bird-centric physics puzzler (what a concept!) that revolves around you finding ways to get incredibly stressed-out fish in the mouths of the correspondingly-colored penguins. You tap the fish to drop it from its hook and get it rolling, then through a combination of timing and obstacle-clearing, get it to the right-colored penguin. Once your penguin is successfully fed, he coughs up ice cream, which you tap to feed each level’s companion and get bonus points when completing the level, garnering a one, two, or three-fish rating.

The concept isn’t new, but the execution feels good. I found myself really enjoying this game, as much for the cute graphics and theme as for the well-designed puzzles. While the earlier puzzles seem easy (don’t they always?), once I really got going it became quite challenging to make sure I got the fish moving in order to clear obstacles. I found myself failing some levels multiple times. Since each level is short, I didn’t mind too much, but it did remind me of how bad my timing is (I still get night terrors regarding the Cave of Wonders level from Aladdin for the Sega Genesis).

Another challenge, though one not personally experienced, is that the colors chosen for each penguin and their food make the game exceptionally trying for color blind people. As mentioned in the forum thread, those who can’t see colors will have a heck of a time getting through this game. If you’re persistent and don’t mind some trial-and-error, you might still enjoy it, but as a person who had enough trouble being able to clearly see everything, I would probably recommend skipping it until a color blind option is added.

The other thing that I personally didn’t like was the in-app purchase option. I’m generally of the conservative “in-app purchase?! Not in my paid app!” mindset (I am a bit of an old person, after all), and my thoughts on Greedy Penguins are no different. Simply beating every level in a world isn’t enough to unlock the next set of levels. In order to unlock the second and third igloos (worlds of 12 puzzles each), you need to have either collected thirty fish (out of only thirty-six) or pay 99¢.

The game also encourages you to waste time in levels by tapping the penguins and their companions to make them do “funny animations,” making it unlikely that you’ll get a perfect score of three fish on your first try. Crafty, no? I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like replaying levels of games just to gain points (or fish) in order to unlock content that I feel entitled to, having already purchased the app.

All things considered, Greedy Penguins is a well-crafted – though hardly groundbreaking – puzzle game. It’s fun and extremely well-executed, with enough challenging puzzles to keep you occupied. If you’ve got a dollar or two burning a hole in your pocket, I’d definitely recommend giving it a spin, especially since it’s Universal. If not, well, you can always get your penguin fix from this video!

TouchArcade Rating:

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Way back in 2010 when Monster Dash [$0.99] was released it felt a tiny bit lacking. Not that it wasn’t a fantastic game, but it could have used a little more depth. You know, upgrades to earn, a complex mission system, maybe eventual retina support?

Now there’s no need to worry about any of that. Not because One Epic Game [$0.99] brings any of that to the table, mind, but because Jetpack Joyride [Free] came out a year later and blew its predecessor out of the water. So why is it we’re still seeing retreads of an older, lesser product? Could it be, she wonders, because Grip Games forgot their own game’s roots when bringing it back from PlayStation Minis?

Say it ain’t so, but I can’t see many other explanations for what’s happened here. One Epic Game isn’t a Monster Dash clone, but there are some obvious similarities. To name a few, both have a humorously hardcore hero, randomized levels and weapon drops, the same flavor of non-stop platforming, the same methods of murdering slow-moving enemies, and three-life heart system. Maybe one wasn’t inspired by the other, but that reads like a bit of a stretch. Now, all’s fair in love, war and game development, especially when it comes to making games on different platforms. But if you’re going to bring your game back to compete against its grandaddy, you at least ought to be sure you’ve made a few improvements in the meantime.

Here’s the thing: One Epic Game has more content than Monster Dash. The latter is an endless runner, period. The former has a handful of levels in a story mode and seven challenge modes on top of that. But more isn’t the same as better, and that’s doubly true here.

The game is presented as a parody, hanging a lantern on all those silly things we’ve seen in games. It’s the broadest sort of parody, satirizing concepts that are virtually universal. Ha ha, tutorials are a pain, aren’t they? And so many games have zombies, am I right? Look at this obnoxiously jingoistic story, and mock these bland heroes and villains.

But here’s the rub – the story, heroes and villains are extremely bland. The tutorial is horrid. It’s not a great joke when you actually respect your audience so little you feel you have to teach them the ins and outs of the jump and shoot buttons. One makes you jump. The other makes you shoot. Got it? And yes, there are zombies. And aliens. And World War II settings. Hah, I bet you haven’t seen so much of any of those things before that you might actually be profoundly tired of playing games that fail to use them in any sort of interesting way.

Maybe I’m just not getting the joke, but does it extend to clarifying why the rest of the game is so sloppy? The lack of Game Center and Retina support are the biggies, but if you look any deeper it’s just issues all the way down. The game makes due with the bare minimum of animation, for example. Alpha Dog, your musclebound space marine stereotype, has just one: running. Jumping is just the running animation slowed down. The enemies only get to walk (or fly) in a straight line until they fall off something, still walking. Only the weapons and jetpack do anything of note with the visuals.

So it goes with the platforming. The game just loves to screw with you, sticking the best power-up in a place you can’t survive or hiding the fact that a platform is too small to hit until you’re already mid-jump. That’s the joy of intentionally frustrating design, but then occasionally a platform crumbles away before you can reach the end or an obstacle you jump over stretches a little too far to be survivable. It’s sloppy, pure and simple.

One Epic Game has two things over Monster Dash: you can chain kill enemies to build up a score multiplier, and you actually have a score, making killing monsters distinctly more valuable than avoiding them. All other things being equal, maybe that would be enough to set it apart. But all other things aren’t equal, and we’ve had nearly two years to find better endless runners in the interim. There’s just no reason to go back to something that might have been an okay (if slightly familiar) title two years ago when there are so many fantastic games coming out right now. If you decide to take the plunge anyways, share your thoughts in the discussion thread. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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We really like when a game can take a well worn genre and do something different to really turn it on its head. Such is the case with Simutronics‘ Tiny Heroes [Free]. It may look like your average tower defense title at first blush, but it actually takes much of those core gameplay concepts and mashes them together with the classic game Dungeon Keeper, providing a fresh take on the tired strategy defense genre. In Tiny Heroes, it’s almost like you’re playing as the dungeon itself. Your job is to set various traps and guards at key points in the dungeon to prevent heroes from coming in and swiping all of your treasure.

It’s a fun idea and works incredibly well, and right now you can find that out for yourself as Tiny Heroes has gone temporarily free. If you for some reason still need convincing to download a free game, then be sure to check out our 5 star review of Tiny Heroes and our bonus podcast interview with two of the developers at Simutronics. Also – and this is privileged information so try to keep it on the down low – during that podcast interview we find out the secret to unlocking the special TouchArcade level in Tiny Heroes. But shhhhhh, don’t tell anybody about that ok? It’ll be our little secret.

At any rate, definitely grab Tiny Heroes while it’s free, you won’t regret it if you’re a fan of good strategy games.

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Way back in April of last year, we caught wind of an interesting looking Kickstarter project called Tweet Land. The idea was that Tweet Land would create randomly generated gameplay events based off of certain keywords sent out over Twitter. So essentially, real people tweeting would power what happened in the game.

It’s a really clever concept on paper, but we were a bit skeptical about how it would pan out in an actual game. Well, it looks like we’ll be able to find out later this month as Tweet Land is set to launch on January 31st.

It sounds like the overall plan for Tweet Land will eventually include different styles of games, but when it launches this month the game will center around controlling a car that’s racing down Route 140. As you drive along, tweets from all over the world will trigger events in the game, like a meteor crashing into the road or a giant Godzilla foot stomping down. Your job is to avoid these kinds of hazards and even fight back against them with an array of weapons, which are also generated from tweets.

It’s hard to tell how well this is going to work, but when I think about a game like Scribblenauts Remix [$1.99] with its bank of more than 20,000 words and seemingly infinite possibilities, I’m hopeful. If Tweet Land has even a fraction of the depth that Scribblenauts has then I think it will be a winner. From what the developers have said on their website and on their Twitter, it sounds like the game will have a whole lot of items to generate. Keep your eyes out for Tweet Land when it launches on January 31st for $1.99 with a free lite version to follow sometime after.

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How long do you need to play to have a good time? Windosill [$2.99] is a straight up terrible value proposition if you like serious length from your games. It doesn’t take much longer than 15 minutes to run through and there’s no real replayability. But damned if it isn’t a great 15 minutes while it lasts.

If you take it down to fundamentals, Windosill is a puzzle game about traveling. A toy car drives from room to room. Each is locked, each has to be solved with creative thinking and exploration to open the next. There are only eleven rooms, and they’re over in a snap. Yet whimsy and charm makes it ever so memorable.

This is a port of a Flash game from 2009, but the iPad version feels like it was always meant to be. There was always something tactile about its puzzles; now players can interact with them directly. Multitouch makes a huge difference – not in how the puzzles are solved, but in how they can be played with.

That’s what Windosill is: playful. It’s a game, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s also a toy. Poking around is almost as fun as solving a room. Each room is filled with interactive widgets – boxes to open, lights to turn on, leaves to pull off – and the trick is to find which ones can be used to open the next door. But playing with everything else will reward you with equally delightful results. And every bit of it is eye-candy, designed with a look to surrealists of the past.

Windosill doesn’t get into how to play, so neither will I. Poke around, experiment. That’s all you need to do. There are no awkward controls to deal with – just tap and drag things around, see what they do. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

There is a little value in the iPad version over the Flash game. Once you complete the game, you can turn on two settings: Complex Gravity and See-Thru. The former lets you play with tilt controls, the latter lets you look at the inner-workings of each level. It doesn’t add much, but it’s an extra bit of play. You can also paw through a sketchbook of concept art.

So there you go. Only you can know if you can be satisfied by such a brief encounter. If you can, Windosill is fantastic. It’s gorgeous, playful and feels like it was born to be played on a touch screen. But I wouldn’t blame you if the brevity is just too much. Bigger isn’t better, but Windosill leaves me wanting more, and there isn’t more to come. Delighted or disappointed? Stop by our discussion thread to share.

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To steal a line from Jon Irwin, “The platforming genre, once dominant, has now been relegated to counterprogramming.” Which is to say that the two-dimensional platformer has overtaken, like kudzu, much of the niche and indie landscape that isn’t dominated by games that involve shooting things in the face. For mobile gaming, that idea is more or less maintained  if you swap face-shooting for physics-puzzling or colored-block-sliding. But that kind of reductive generalization doesn’t leave room for nuance, and nuance is exactly what you need to talk about Terra Noctis.

At first blush, Terra Noctis [$.99] seems pretty derivative: the pits are inexplicably endless, the physics are rudimentary, and the enemies — pumped in straight from the Mushroom Kingdom — die if something lands on their heads. Even the narrative introduction seems particularly on the nose: Allen is a nightmare who isn’t scary enough to pass his monster exams. Desperate, he sneaks out of school to find a way to get scarier. The idea is never revisited.

It’s not long before Fire Fruit Forge starts to introduce new mechanics: shooting, power-ups, puzzles, three different types of currency, and a bat named Columbus who guides Allen to secret areas and sometimes, bafflingly, lets him ride around on his back. Unfortunately, these do little to dispel the first impression: some of the mechanics don’t really affect the core platforming, and the ones that do are one-note concepts that don’t add much.

There are three different collectible items that can be spent: blue fairies buy power-ups, red fairies unlock the next hub-world, and golden coins unlock bonus levels. It’s kind of weird that a game about crushing goomba skulls involves so many ways to buy stuff.

I like the idea in theory — collectibles have long been a staple of the genre, and Fire Fruit Forge are right to give Allen’s monetized pixie dust mechanical value. Because these items are hidden throughout each non-linear level, players are ostensibly motivated to explore. This, in turn, introduces a risk-reward element to Terra Noctis‘ points system and OpenFeint leaderboards: player score is based both on speed and collection, and climbing the leaderboards depends on managing both.

There are problems with the system, though. The power-ups add very little to Terra Noctis, and using them never become a regular part of my strategy. This devalues the importance of the blue fairies, which in turn makes collecting them less gratifying. It disrupts the balance of the entire system. Similarly, the red fairies and coins are too easy to find, and the levels they unlock are too cheap: not once was my progress impeded by a lack of funds. In other words, not once was I motivated to explore Terra Noctis in a meaningful way.

The other supplemental mechanics, like shooting and flying, simply aren’t creative enough to keep Terra Noctis moving forward. The first time I shot a bat to complete a puzzle was neat, but the shooting function hasn’t changed since. These things are largely tangential to the running, jumping, and head-stomping, but adding extra mechanics isn’t the same as using them effectively. It doesn’t help that the environments and level design change very rarely, despite there being four different hub-worlds to explore. Visually and mechanically, Terra Noctis is a static place, and the entire experience can tend to feel same-y.

Despite the lack of variety, Terra Noctis is buoyed up by its visual design. You’ll explore the same vague forest and cave designs over and over, but the backgrounds are a nice example of parallax scrolling, and the foreground has a lush, storybook feel to it. The animations are fluid and expressive — I especially like that Columbus, the helper-bat, manages to seem anxious and excitable, even though he’s basically just a set of eyes with wings. There’s an undeniable charm and innocence that runs through every piece of this game.

You’ll also hear the same four or five synthpop tracks during the course of the game, but the Herbie Hancock-esque score — no, seriously — is used judiciously to set the tone for each level.

It doesn’t hurt that Terra Noctis is so fun to play. Even disengaged from the high-level design choices, jumping up and down and stomping purple goombas is a treat, thanks in no small part to the game’s  controls: they’re simply the most sensitive and responsive virtual buttons I’ve encountered to date. They aren’t perfect, though, since the buttons are placed too closely to one another — I often find myself going left when I mean to go right.

(The other systemic bugbear in Terra Noctis is hit detection: Allen’s hitbox seems too big and he often finds himself stuck in a ledge or block. This might lead to a few unwarranted deaths, but the checkpoints are spaced evenly enough that it never becomes a huge issue.)

Still, the level design is generous enough to accommodate those lapses, and the most significant exploration is vertical, not horizontal.  Players sometimes get cut off from areas they mean to explore, but Terra Noctis is usually pretty good about expanding and bottlenecking appropriately. In all but a few exceptions, you can feel free to wander around, comfortable with the knowledge that you will eventually circle around toward the critical path.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Terra Noctis‘ more ambitious designs fall through — there’s a lot of fluff that distracts from the core. As it stands, the game’s fairy-tale premise evokes something akin to coming home for a long weekend. The game’s strengths are found in the understated joy of jumping through space, of seeing some unreachable ledge or platform and guiding Allen to it. Terra Noctis, through its intuitive controls and design, provides simple pleasure. This is comfort gaming — familiar, identifiable, and care-free. I’m ready to spend Martin Luther King Day in my pajamas, guiding Allen through the rest of his quest.  I’m pretty sure I know where he’s heading.

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