So, erm - I don't know if I can actually recommend this game. There are 7 chapters to this, and they get progressively more difficult. It is quite lovely to start with, but around chapter 4-ish, the puzzles start to become a lot more physics-y, and, well, badly designed. There is a pretty useful rule about good puzzle design, and that is that while it is perfectly fine to have players get stuck in a puzzle, then, once a player has realised the correct solution, it should take a minimum of fuzz to implement it and move on. By mid-game Mushroom 11 starts breaking this rule repeatedly, and this becomes incredibly frustrating in the later chapters until chapter 7, where fundamentally every puzzle is like this.Mark wrote:I've just added that to my wishlist, cheers. Sounds pretty cool.funkstar wrote:Moving on, I've cracked the lid on Mushroom 11, another puzzle platformer from the January Monthly. While the art design means that I cannot call it charming, there is so much to like about this. The central mechanic (and I hope, the only mechanic) is really cleverly done, and the puzzles, although not (yet?) as cerebral as in Talos (probably due to the dependence on the dynamics of the... blob... thing... you control) are well-done so far. John Walker's WIT threatens that things may not be all that perfect come the later stages, but so far this is pretty damn good.
For instance: in chapter 6 or 7 there's a steep incline with a jump across an acid pool. You cannot "reach" across the pool, so you try to roll down the incline. Doesn't work, you cannot roll fast enough. So you notice that the partially wheel-like thing at the top can actually be moved - great, let's roll inside that. Doesn't work, it isn't round enough to give you greater speed. Ok, so you shape yourself inside the wheel while it is rolling to approximate roundness. Doesn't work either. So you gather you need to "jump" out of the wheel while clearing the gap. Doesn't work either. But, this is actually the solution to the puzzle. There isn't something you've missed, some part you've overlooked. You've just been at the mercy of the engine, which decided to grow you in such a way to snag the wheel, robbing you of the momentum you need, or maybe the momentum was slightly off so the you had the exits to the wheel pointing in the wrong direction when you needed to exit it, while clearing the gap. But, after perhaps 20 more tries it just suddenly works.
Conversely, in Talos, if a platform is too high to jump onto, you know that you're missing (quite literally) a piece of the puzzle. You're never asked to clear a gate with just a particularly tricky jump, where the wonky physics makes you slide off a wall 95% of the time - no, there's always a jammer, or an activation panel or the like, so that if you have the right idea, you can do the puzzle in one go. In Mushroom, however, you might get the right idea almost immediately, but keep getting screwed by the growth of the blob and the physics engine, over which you exert far less control than seemingly necessary; or you might genuinely have the wrong idea. But because it is often so hard to differentiate between the two, you can find yourself persuing the "almost" solution for a very long time, and then spend as much time on the "correct" solution afterwards.
This quote (and most of what the link says) summarizes my experience quite well: "I loved Mushroom 11. Then I liked it. Then I tolerated it. Then I hated it, and that’s pretty much where I stopped." I'm glad I tried it for the unique movement mechanic it uses, but I just don't need the grief of the latter puzzles.
