Puzzle Bloom is a shiny, cel-shaded puzzler that mixes frameworks, giving you the abstraction of puzzle games with the avatar-centricity of Miyamoto-frameworked games. It´s got great technical polish and is yet another example of what can be brought to the web. The game has you controlling a green tree spirit, of if you´re hip to Celtic death lore, a will-o'-the-wisp. You possess these cretinous industrial workers in a dystopian factory world, trying to avoid its high-tech lasers and bloom out green goodness. To that end, it´s kind of like Flower meets Messiah.
Despite all its charms, the game is basically a trace-the-lines exercise in the tradition of most puzzle games, from Sokoban to Exploit. There isn´t much of a psychological edge or procedural meaning that correlates with the theme, it´s mostly just a timing/switch tracing exercise coupled with the possession mechanic, which is refreshingly brisk. It is what it is, and you will be too when possessed by a lilting ball of incandescent soul-stuff.
I got stuck...
The second thing I am asked to do (right after "click left button") is to "use the scroll wheel to zoom". I'm on my laptop and I have no scroll wheel.
Too bad they won't let me play until I master the camera controls. :(
Hideous and buggy
Yeah, I managed to take control of the second buy before the tutorial even ran, and the speech bubble on the first guy wouldn't go away.
The graphics overall were pretty unpleasant, with lines dangling in midair and little glitches.
It has potential, but I wasn't interested in it for very long. Maybe I'll come back to it after some polish.
PuzzleBloom team to the rescue!
@Fletch: Fixed, the hint timeouts now after a couple of seconds. It wasn't a touchpad thing - the game works fine with touchpads. It just has issues with some drivers when it comes to scrolling. Try playing now! :)
@JoeHonkie: Congratulations, you managed to catch a very rare case of a bug and thanks for letting us know. It's fixed now.
As for "lines dangling in midair and little glitches" - could you send us a screenshot or two, to give us a chance to fix it?
Happy playing and stay tuned for more challenging levels - they're coming soon.
its always pleasantly refreshing
to see that the developers care enough to fix bugs reported in the wild, like on some blog or other
thanks guys!
oh and
on a side note, I couldn't but help think of the companion cube when playing this...
Bugs
I will look into playing it again. Might be my video card, which hasn't been generating graphical effects, but my computer is acting up.
I'll try it from home and get back to you if I still see graphics issues.
Thanks devs!
Thanks for fixing that!
I played through the first set of puzzles. It's fun, I didn't know you could pull off those blobby earth-healing visual effects in Unity.
The pleasure
is all ours :)
@JoeHonkie: it might be some quirks of your graphics card, but in any case I agree that we need to tweak the edge detection filter we're using for the outline.
@Fletch: you can, all with some shader magic. ;) We'll make an example project showing how to do that - in a week or so there will be info on our forum.
Played more
Ok, great game. Puzzles were hard without being devised as some fiendish form of mental torture.
Still not loving the toon shading, edges lines seem to appear on front surfaces in ugly ways, and the lines get drawn in front of the laser beams, which just looks odd. Didn't see any bugs, though.
For some reason the setting and weird little voices make me think of Oddworld, and that's not a bad thing.