Two-Week Contest Review #7
A Boy and His Cursor by Avataro
This is a quest that if you believe it has any resemblance to Zelda 1, you're crazy. This quest is based on puzzles (surprise! 
), which is really interesting. But is it great and well made? Let's see...
Note: This review will be short because every screen is about solving puzzles, and I'm not going to talk about every single screen
Gameplay
This quest's gameplay, as said above, is radically different from Zelda 1. The gameplay consists of puzzles, and you have to solve them to get a diamond.
What you have to do is use your cursor, which can break cracked blocks, and push blocks, to get to your diamond:
Clicking those cracked blocks with your cursor makes them disappear. Cool, huh?
Anyways, you continue forth in collecting your diamonds, and the cursor will sometimes, on specific levels, give you an update that allows you to do more things with the environment you are trying to solve. Also, the later levels can get very tricky, especially those that have "bug Ganon" chasing after you, forcing you to solve the puzzle quickly or else we will kill you. Those levels can sometimes become very tedious. Here's one of them with bug Ganon:
Aaaah! That thing is chasing me!! 
Also, some levels can become VERY hard. Here's one that I spent like 15 minutes trying to solve before I finally got it.
While the gameplay is very fun and creative, there is one thing that really annoys me. It's when there is a line of text with the cursor explaining things, especially those that you get an update, where if you screw up and have to continue, you have to wait until the update happens again. Sometimes this happens repeatedly, and it can get very annoying. And I'm pretty sure there is a way to make the text stop appearing after you've seen it once. That's pretty much my only annoyance with the gameplay, so great job!
Story
This quest has kind of a story, but is essentially collect 50 diamonds to "save the world". Oh, and there is an a pretty big plot twist at the end. So you'll be surprised with that.
Design Attention
There's not much to say here, as the design of the quest as a whole is essentially the placement and creativity of the puzzle blocks itself. But I guess I'll show some screens that were very clever, at least to me.
On the last screenshot, you have to click on the blocks to teleport them to the gate, and ...., you should see it.
There are many more cool screens that what I showed, but I didn't obviously take a screenshot of every single screen....
Music
The music was the same throughout the puzzles, and it was a good choice, but it got really repetitive after awhile. If the music would change to something more intense after, say, halfway through the quest, the music enjoyment would be better. At least the boss was a very nice theme!!
Concluding Thoughts/Summary
A Boy and His Cursor is a neat and clever quest, that, while it can get annoying, should be something that everyone should play since this shows the true power of what Zelda Classic can do.
Strengths
- Creative use of scripts to achieve something amazing
- Cleverly created puzzles to solve
- Neat things you can do with your cursor
- Great attention to making the puzzles
- Good music choices
- Requires thinking
Weaknesses
- Levels that can take large amounts of time to figure out
- Text doesn't disappear after reading it once, which can get annoying if you have to continue many times
- Repetitive music
Rating: 9.4/10 (Amazing)
Database Rating: 5/5 (Great)
Edited by DaviAwesome, 11 August 2013 - 06:15 PM.
Hope no one else contracts this evil.
, but maybe you could make it only available if you've seen the message once?
