Platforming and Falling Puzzle games are two great genres. Platforming challenges your manual dexterity, while falling puzzles test your forethought and your ability to think on your feet. You would think, then, that putting the two together could turn out to be a great and challenging new genre. In the case of Pinky vs Blocks, unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly work out quite that way.
Gameplay
The premise of the game is that you play a small pink blob who is trapped in a prison. Luckily, he has some expansive mental powers, including the ability to manipulate blocks falling from the ceiling to help him escape. The game consists of a series of screens, each with a different layout of pre-existing permanent blocks and a required number of block lines which need to be cleared to continue. The falling block portion of the game is pure Tetris, with a few extra block configurations. Because I happen to love both Tetris and platforming, it’s a shame then that Pinky vs Blocks is plagued with a number of problems.
To begin with, the falling block portion of the game is badly constructed. The block motion is continuous rather than moving one tick on first press and having a split second wait before moving continuously when holding a direction. This is the behavior I have come to expect, because it has worked so well in the past. Instead, I found myself often overshooting and landing a block in an unintended position, potentially destroying my entire strategy.
Pinky vs Blocks throws in an interesting addition to the Tetris formula, in that the blocks are actually constructed from two distinct sub-blocks, blue and yellow. Like Tetris you can rotate the entire block; however, unlike Tetris, you can actually rotate the sub-blocks independently. While this is extremely handy for making sure you get the best block for the given situation, I found it to be difficult to use since it is hard to mentally calculate how to form the block you want out of what you’ve got in the short time you have while it plummets to the bottom, while also avoiding crushing Pinky. The worst part, however, was that the entire block doesn’t rotate around its center as in Tetris, it instead rotates around its oriented upper left corner. This issue compounded by the fact that a block will not rotate when placed against a wall. All together, this left me with a very unsatisfactory view of the block component.
Continuing with the gripes theme, lets talk a little bit about lives. Any time Pinky falls to far or gets squashed, you use up a life and have to start the screen over. When you run out of lives, it’s game over and you have to restart from the very beginning. For a game of this difficulty level, I think the lives system is an unnecessary addition to the game. What makes this even worse, is that due to the problematic play involved in the falling block portion, I often found myself locked into no-win scenarios forcing either a suicide or outright frustration to the point of quitting. I feel the game would have benefitted from ditching this system in favor of making it a gauntlet of endurance.
While Pinky himself functions adequately, the main problem this game suffers from is that it simply attempts to do too much all at once. There are two games going on simultaneously, and only enough controls for one. I found the controls to be very confusing, often forgetting which button was for which function, inevitably leading to expenditure of one of Pinky’s “special powers” and being subject to the skill reset with no gain. I can completely understand the necessity of having advanced controls such as these for a game like this, but more so it made me wonder that since this particular combination of genres necessitates such controls, maybe it’s not a combination that inherently works.
Audio/Visual
The visuals in Pinky vs Blocks are done in what I can only guess is what you would call “programmer art.” The unfortunate thing about indie games is that most people who are proficient programmers aren’t the greatest artists. The graphics are simplistic to the point of distraction. My biggest problem in the graphical arena is with the text. It’s not that it’s hard to read, but it is composed of both upper and lower case letters, is used with various bright clashing primary colors, and appears to use the default Photoshop beveled edge filter, all together giving a very amateurish look. This game could definitely have benefited from a trained artist having a hand at redoing the graphical aesthetic entirely.
While the sound effects were very “stock,” I didn’t find them detracting from the game. The music however, is a strange mix of folk and Celtic with a vocal overtone that I don’t think works for this game. You can hear the music for yourself in the trailer below.
Summary
This is a game with an incredibly interesting premise that, in this case, doesn’t quite pan out. The complexity involved in attempting to simultaneously pay attention to the falling blocks and manipulating them and moving a character with the fragility to not survive a long fall makes the game intensely inaccessible to typical players.
Pinky vs Blocks by Victor Arnelas is available on XBox Live Indie Games for 80 points. I can only recommend it to people who are looking for a serious challenge in overcoming the complexities of the combination of games, while simultaneously not caring about the aesthetics.
