Leaves: The Journey
Zar 21/Daedelic
“Travel to the mystic lands
of Mononino and help the Treefruities to recover the lost leaves of
their home tree. Search for clues to master the many puzzles and
challenges on your journey”.
This is a delightfully arty
puzzle-fest. If puzzles are your thing, you will be right at home.
You are looking for the leaves,
which will you will find by unlocking worlds and moving through the
various locations. The key to the lock will be a puzzle. There are over
30, all of them well constructed, some not so hard, some rather hard
indeed, none impossibly brain-busting. Some have everything right there
in front of you, others you will have to find information elsewhere to
provide the clues. For many, what exactly is the puzzle is part of the
puzzle itself. Pattern recognition, manipulating shapes, working out
colour and number sequences, deciphering codes and text, and things I
haven’t seen elsewhere – those things are here.
They are all wrapped in the
charming world of the Treefruitees, and the real world art of the maker.
Sprinkle it with an array of cheeky, chirpy characters only visible when
you observe the scene through the magnifying glass, and accompany it
with a minimalistic ambient sound palette and you get a rather engaging
surrealistic world in which to do your puzzles.
It’s all point and click, a few
icons indicating things you can do. Each location is a single screen,
explored with the mouse. You don’t move about the screen, rather it’s
all there in front of you. Move the mouse to the edge and if you can
exit that way you will get a pop up directional arrow. Move the mouse to
the top of the screen, and a drawstring will allow you to pull down the
inventory, showing items you use with certain puzzles, and others which
provide clues. Your growing collection of leaves is displayed, and a
compass symbol, which takes you to a map showing all the locations,
where you are, and most importantly the leaves to be found in each
location. If you miss some, it helps in the subsequent search.
My only quibble was you couldn’t
generally display the clue on the screen at the same time as you
manipulated the puzzle. Many were presented as artists' palettes, and
clicking on them displayed them dead centre of screen, over the top of
the location you were in. To go back into the location resulted in the
clue being put away. There are plenty of ways round this, but the
ability to move the clue and have it remain in view while you interacted
with the location would have been nice.
But it was a small thing, and I
got the leaves home. Apparently though the Treefruities have moved to a
new tree, one with a cold though, and a sneeze has again scattered their
leaves. I am called upon again, and I expect to have as much puzzling
fun as I did this time.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
Video card: AMD
Radeon RX 470 8192MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
April 2017
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