3/13/2023 0 Comments Hexcells off screenNobody needs to be told about a game they’d never hear about otherwise, only to be told why they didn’t need to hear about it. It’s so very blatantly a Hexcells rip-off that it was all I could do not to just write about how usefully it highlights the brilliance of Hexcells in all the ways it’s not as good as it. And I never did.If I may be indelicate for a moment, I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to write about Hexceed. I can appreciate from a distance how clever each level is, and how clever you must be to design a game like this. It never demanded anything from me, so I never felt anything except just a gentle soothing serenity. I just expected something a little more from Spring Falls besides being beautiful. You could take a screenshot of any of the game's 60 levels and it would make a stunning desktop wallpaper. And sometimes, I'd sit back and just gaze at the screen, transfixed by its precise polygons and gentle geometry. I was like a god without purpose beyond experimentation and unrestrained play. I'd delight in the tactility, in the pleasing pops and splashes of the terrain responding to my touch. I played with the levels like a big ball of Plasticine. But I'm also not sure if it's fair to be framing all this as bad design, because I've enjoyed my time playing Spring Falls - just for different reasons than I expected. Because I'd be just so utterly lost, having never internalised the rules and logic of the puzzles. I think if I stopped playing Spring Falls for a while and came back to it days or weeks later, I'd have to start from the very first level again. And I'm clever for figuring it out! This game is great!". I never found myself thinking, "Oh, I see how this all fits together. Give me a glass of RumChata and I'd be as placid as a puddle within seconds.īut the downside was that I'd never get the big picture at the end of each level, the lightbulb moment that I so adored from games like Hexcells or, much more recently, Return Of The Obra Dinn. I'd sink back into my seat, feet stretched out, hand on mouse, clicking and dragging tiles, listening to the beautiful Firewatch-cum-Rimworld guitar strumming in the background. And the fact that I never really engaged the analytical portion of my brain probably helped a lot with the relaxing nature of it all. I was playing on instinct, because I'd quickly realised this was the best way to play. Interestingly, Sin described the game in much the same way when she played it for Unknown Pleasures last year, but I didn't read her thoughts until after I'd played it myself and come to exactly the same conclusion. The act of completing a level almost always involved me pulling down a particular tile, watching all the pretty terraforming take place, and then staring at the screen trying to figure out what had just happened. But it's also because, despite the simplicity of the rules governing these levels, the levels themselves quickly become complex enough that you're better off trying something to see if it works than attempting to predict the consequences of your move beforehand. This is partially down to the ease with which you can undo your last action via a prominent button in the top-right corner, which utterly eliminates any need for caution. But Spring Falls seems to encourage players to play in an instinctive manner, rather than a contemplative one. Every few levels a new mechanic is introduced, such as soil tiles which raise upwards with a satisfying wine-cork-like "THOOK" when you irrigate them and rain levels which automatically fill any closed-off areas of land with as much water as they can hold. By pulling certain tiles down and releasing bodies of water into new areas, you can cause the irrigated tiles to spread until they reach the flowers - which is how you induce them to bloom. These irrigated tiles will automatically spread to any adjacent tile that is also adjacent to water. It took me sitting down away from the game and doing some inordinately grim-faced think-work to actually comprehend the rules governing each of those beautiful little self-contained ecosystems.Įach level starts with certain tiles being irrigated. The way this is done is quite simple - but if you'd asked me to explain it while playing, I would have had no idea. The aim is to manipulate the terrain of each miniature hex-based level, redirecting bodies of water in order to make all of the flowers on the level bloom. Spring Falls is an extremely pretty little puzzle game about irrigation.
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