The Architect

Довольно простая по структуре головоломка: нужно довести шарик от входа до выхода, собрав по дороге все сферы. Сферы - которые называются здесь "модификаторами пространства" - одновременно служат подъёму территории (зелёные) или опусканию (синие). Сам шарик вверх залезать не может, но вниз падает за милую душу. Поднять или опустить можно любую клетку, кроме красных. (Так что в итоге всё сводится к "найди такой путь, чтобы тебе хватило сфер). Кроме этого, на поле есть телепортаторы, перебрасывающие из одной зоны в другую, и выходы на другие под-уровни. И всё бы хорошо, но немедленно вылезает несколько проблем: - Шарик управляется курсором, и ходит мгновенно. Платформы выбираются мышью. И отменить ходы нельзя. Свалился не туда, куда надо - перезапускай уровень. Кликнул не по той платформе, истратив драгоценные сферы - перезапускай уровень. Кликнул по той, но ошибся, хочешь ты поднять или опустить - перезапускай. (Можно сохраниться, но это же надо знать заранее, где ошибёшься - а каждый ход сохраняться тоже как-то глупо). - Уровень полупрозрачный, и высота опознаётся исключительно "на глаз". Не угадал с высотой - до свидания, начинай сначала. Ещё уровень можно вращать - но это не плавное вращение, а поворот на 90 градусов, поэтому гарантированно что-то видно да не будет, с любой позиции. - Двигать точку обзора можно. Мышкой. На краях экрана. Медленно и печально. Очень скоро (по мере нарастания размера уровней) хочется дать ей пинка, чтобы двигалась побыстрее. - В "казуальном" режиме у тебя бесконечное число сфер, и игра вообще ничего из себя не представляет (ты тупо строишь дорожку от входа до выхода). В "нормальном" ты ограничен тем, что собрал, и в итоге каждый подъём/спуск превращается в гадание "поднять или опустить, чтоб хватило" - "гадание", потому что см. выше - рассчитать что-то дальше, чем три клетки от шарика, мне не представляется возможным - видно плохо и поправить это можно с трудом и не всегда. Итого: будь эта головоломка плоской, с ясно видимыми высотами - или, наоборот, абсолютно объёмной, чтобы можно было в любую точку посмотреть так, как тебе хочется - может, я бы и играл. А вот в этом исполнении у меня вызывает только раздражение. Особенно учитывая, что и как головоломка она мне не особо нравится. Не моё.

The Architect is a puzzle game of varied difficulties by Spooky Star. In order to understand how the difficulties work, you must understand how the game is played: You find yourself on a translucent board made of blocks, all of which are on different levels. You can’t jump up but you can drop to a different level. Gathering certain objects of one color allows you to bring a block one level up per object. Gathering objects of another color allows you to bring a block down one level per object. Difficulties, then, are based on whether you need to gather all the objects or not before you exit the level. Larger, harder levels are labyrinth-like, so that even in the easiest difficulty you will have to consider your moves carefully – after all, you have only a limited amount of objects in the board meant to raise or lower blocks, and you might end up walking yourself into a dead end. The puzzles themselves are pretty great if you’re into harder puzzles that make you think through each step, particularly on the higher difficulty settings. The controls weren’t too bad but they weren’t overly good, either. I feel like they could’ve put a bit more thought in them, and while it’s hard to describe precisely why, I’ll just say the combination of mouse and keyboard felt a bit awkward sometimes. There was an attempt to put a bit of a story on the puzzle, but I don’t feel it’s that good nor that it was needed. I do appreciate the effort in trying, though. The basic idea of it is: you’re just a mysterious object tasked with bringing a world to life. It’s interesting and gives it a nice touch, but there was no need to try and add depth to it. The graphics were probably what bothered me the most. They weren’t bad, but they were confusing. I do understand the need to make the blocks translucent so as not to block the view of lower levels, yet at the same time this made the puzzles much harder. It’s probably also part of it – to add difficulty to the puzzles – but at some pints it was just annoying, as most of the angles on larger levels became confusing – was that at the same level or lower? – more than once I fell on a lower level because of this and locked myself out of moves, or even lowered/rose a platform thinking it was going to be at the right level when it really wasn’t – or when I was really seeing one beyond. All in all, The Architect is a really nice puzzle game but I found it far from relaxing, and relaxing is how I like my puzzles best.

It's a bit boring and believe it or not, to lower and lift blocks is actually quite annoying because sometimes the cursor selects a different block when you try to lower or lift another one.

On a mac. Controller doesn't work at all. 100% unplayable. Complete waste of money and time. PROTIP: Don't port a game to mac if you're not going to bother to make it work. AWFUL. DO NOT PLAY. There is simply no excuse for saying a game works on mac but obviously not bothering to playtest.

Could have had potential, however, the operation of raising and lowering blocks needs work. You click on the block that you want to move then a choice appears, all good so far, problem is to make the choice you have to click to the left of the chooseable options. It would be better to actually click on the options instead of trying to guess where you are supposed to be clicking! I will be happy to edit this review if the developers can find a way to make this problem go away!!! The developers have now solved this problem, so I am changing this review to positive! I will do a full review at a later time, now that I can actually play the game!

Quirkly puzzle game. Not quite a platformer since there is not actual jumping involved. There certainly are platforms in abudance though. You can raise and lower them as you accumulate either blue or green energy balls. Those balls can lower or raise, respectively, any platform cell by one level per energy ball consumed. This leads (somewhat) to a planning element where you navigate the maze of platform cells at various levels, while attempting to not run out of energy balls. If you do, and get in an area from which you cannot escape, you have to restart the whole level. Some of these levels can be quite huge and its easy to get disoriented, since the main problem with the game is the lack of control of the camera in terms of being able to easily move it to where you need it. This can be VERY frustrating. Yes, you can hit Q or E to rotate the screen 90 degrees, and you can hit F or R to tilt the camera, but what is desperately missing is any keyboard command to shift the camera left, right, up or down. Instead, you have to move the mouse to the edge of the screen, which makes it difficult to control exactly which angle you end up with. Sometimes, I had to zoom the camera out (using the mouse wheel) just to be able to shift the screen to the point where I could see my little guy again. Just adding keyboard commands to control the camera without the depending on the mouse would help immensely. Two other gripes I had while playing were also mentioned by other reviewers. First, it can be difficult to select the particular cell you want to raise or lower. And even when you do, then you have to be very careful when you try and select the up or down arrow without accidentally selecting another cell, the wrong cell, which can really screw you up. It's entirely possible to accidentally raise or lower and cell in this way, and then have to restart the level. Second, the levels while fairly large and somewhat challenging, seemed haphazard in their construction. There seemed to be more attention paid to how the level looked (like a tree for instance) than on having a focused solution that you would need to follow to complete the level. Other planning puzzle games like Tori Tori have this essential element that this game mostly lacks--namely the element of having to figure out the right order to go where and do what. Here, any level has many possible solutions, and you mainly only have to worry about not running too low on energy balls. Using a simple greedy strategy of going where there are more balls that won't cost you a net loss once you consume the next ball seems to always work. Honestly, I quickly tired of this game after not finding a real mental effort to grab my attention. The game seemed to depend on throwing large levels at you where you are trying to gather all the balls and not really adding much challenge beyond that. As a result, the gameplay became tedious, and not very fun. Do I recommend this game then? Well, this was a tough one, since I do think the game has some interesting dynamics and a lot of potential. The camera problems could be mostly fixed by adding some more keyboard controls. The levels could be more carefully designed and crafted to really require thinking ahead. So on a scale of 1 to 10, I might be very generous in giving this game a 6. Very generous, indeed. Since 6 is slightly more positive than negative, I guess I "recommend" this game, but with all the cavaets stated.

Great puzzle and awesome idea! I recommend it to anyone looking for a good logic game.

You could say it's got Its ups and downs....:) (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐□-□ (⌐□_□) youtube.com/c/leighbagsgames But anyways. I had the opportunity to try out this game, a simple puzzle Platformer-ish game. Use orthagonal movement to retrieve all of the pieces, the orbs collected give you one platform movement, either up or down. this can be used to help take you to the next orb or take the orb to you. The story is a bit of a wrapper, and is only lightly related to the actual game loop, but the core mechanics are solid. I have no idea how many puzzles there are. If you run out you can create new ones and share them with your friends, or enemies. I'll be putting some gameplay footage of this game on my channel on Thursday July the 23rd (2015). I'll hopefully update the review once it is up. Subscribe on my channel to see the some game footage this week