Hollow Mind: The Lost Puppy

good.

no

While this game doesn't do anything especially bad, it simply doesn't offer any reason to play it. It looks pretty, but the gameplay is too simplistic to offer any intrinsic entertainment, and there's no narrative or other such reward to make it worth sitting through. Add in the bugs and general lack of polish and you get a game that simply isn't worth the time in its current state. The core of an interesting game is certainly here, but it's barebones enough that it feels more like a project the developer used to play around with ideas than an actual game. The biggest issue in my opinion is a lack of reward or positive feedback for the player. For example, the stated goal given at the beginning of the game is to collect the "three" stuffed animals in every level. However, not only are there more than three of them in many levels, but there's no actual incentive to collect most of them. A few of them have achievements tied to them, but it's fully possible to gather all the achievements without collecting them, leaving most of them utterly pointless. There is another collectible object that the game gives at least a semblance of a purpose. Like many platformers, this game includes a minor collectible in the form of "coins" which look like honeycomb pieces. There's an achievement for collecting the very first one, but like the stuffed animals that only rewards collecting a specific coin. Coins, however, also contribute to your score and a leaderboard for total number of coins collected. Unfortunately, neither of these ultimately lead to any feeling of accomplishment. Because the leaderboard counts the same coin being collected repeatedly and the coins come back every time you die or restart a level, there's no reason to collect the sparsely placed coins in most levels as opposed to repeatedly grabbing the most densely packed coins in a couple of the later levels. Each coin collected does increase your score by ten points. They are also the only thing that increase your score. The score is kept between levels, resets when you die, and is recorded nowhere. While the game could undoubtedly benefit from general polish throughout, I believe there are some easy changes that could be made to make the game feel less inherently unsatisfying. If collecting the stuffed animals is to be the main point of the game, unlocking new levels by collecting enough bears instead of just by finishing the previous level would go a long way to reinforce this point, as would throwing in an achievement or some other reward for collecting all of them. Adding a high score display would be a simple way to give the player something to aim for, and adding more ways to earn points (e.g. defeating enemies, completing levels quickly) would make the moment-to-moment gameplay feel more purposeful. In levels added later on, the developer added a way to recover your health after being hurt by enemies, in the form of green crystals. Instead of adding a new type of collectible, coins could have been made to feel more valuable by having each one collected slightly restore your health. Most importantly in my opinion, adding some sort of concrete "end" would do a lot for this game. There doesn't need to be some epic boss enemy or exciting climax, though they would certainly be appreciated. Just displaying a "Congratulations" and doing a credit roll the first time you beat the final level would go a long way to providing a sense of completion. This may all seem like harsh complaints for a game that has no serious problems, but it's what this game doesn't have that is the problem. Without any guiding purpose, the game feels empty and hollow, more of a proof of concept or tech demo than an actual game. The lack of purpose that pervades it will leave its players feeling so unfulfilled that they'll end up writing essays about its near-total lack of reward in a desperate attempt to gain any sense of closure.