REVIEW #121
Puzzle Monarch: Nile River
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My emotions are going in several different directions as I write this review. Part of me feels like I should be ashamed for giving an shoddily-constructed game like Puzzle Monarch: Nile River a thumbs up. Part of me internally cowers at the thought of getting negative feedback for recommending a title that occasionally seems like it was created by an amateur programmer. Part of me feels like the only "right" thing to do is give this title a thumbs down.
...and finally, part of me embraces the fact that I had a good deal of fun while playing this puzzle game to completion. Obviously, that's the part that won my internal conflict.
Puzzle Monarch: Nile River has a very simple premise: complete a picture puzzle by swapping two tiles at a time. There are 15 pictures that are rendered into puzzles, and each puzzle starts in a 3x3 grid of squares before reformatting the same picture into a 6x6 grid. There's no time limit or opportunity to fail. You just keep playing until you complete the puzzle, advance to the next, and rinse/repeat until you've completed all 30 puzzles.
The problems and shortcomings of Puzzle Monarch: Nile River are rather small in number, but they show up continuously. For starters, there's an interesting acoustic track that plays in the background, but its volume is SUPER low compared to the sound effects, and there's no controls to adjust either sound level. Another issues is how the square puzzle pieces sometimes don't line up properly with the grid leaving small lines of the background image visible between the pieces. However, that's not nearly as much of a problem as how some pictures don't seem to have been cut up properly, as I noticed small sections of a picture occasionally repeating on the edges of two conjoining puzzle pieces. While this thankfully doesn't come close to affecting every puzzle piece, it happens enough where it can make constructing a puzzle just a bit harder and take a little more time than it should. Plus, it just looks janky and ugly.
So, why would I recommend Puzzle Monarch: Nile River if it contains such blatant issues? As stated above, I can't deny that I found myself being able to easily look past those problems and just have fun with the game. I even occasionally found myself looking forward to firing it up and completing a couple of puzzles while relaxing after work. I think part of it is that the game is quite simple to play, and I liked most of the pictures that I was presented with during play. Also, while I still think that having the background music track so unnecessarily quiet and nonadjustable in volume is an inexcusable oversight regarding the game's development, I found myself vibing to the track, and I didn't even mind that it looped. (For context, the song's length is approximately 3 minutes, so my experience was not of a 12-second sound clip that obnoxiously repeated the entire time that I played.)
The biggest thing that I take issue with is the game's price. Currently, Puzzle Monarch: Nile River is available for $5 USD, which is way too much for the amount of content that you get, especially when you consider how sloppily developed the game can sometimes appear to be. With that said, there is some fun to be had here, and I somehow found this small puzzle title to be more than the sum of its parts. If it's ever on a decent sale and you feel like a no-frills casual puzzle experience, this is by no means the worst option to go with.
