We gave the Tiny Bang Story, a family friendly PC puzzle game to Elfa, our newest member of the CalmDownTom team. Read on to see how she (and her family) got on!
In every gamers life there is always one game that you compare everything to and find out that you mention it quite a lot. This is THE Game for you. For me that was Neverhood; a funny old game with puzzles and a clay characters and with a sort of cartoon feel to it. Every time I start playing another puzzle game I cannot stop myself from comparing it to Neverhood. And almost always I was left a bit disappointed. Until I got my mitts on The Tiny Bang Story.
Let’s start from the outside. The box itself looks stunning with great art and very nice iridescent colours. It contains the game disk (as it should!) but there’s also a nice surprise – a double sided poster, a soundtrack CD (although a bit short, I must admit, only about 20 odd minutes) and a puzzle inside the game box. The puzzle itself is a bit puzzling (pun intended) as it is cut in 4 parts which have a sort of part frame that you need to remove and then fit the 4 remainders of the puzzle together. Confusing, isn’t it? I myself was confused too. And the quality wasn’t brilliant. But, hey, it’s a freebie, we shouldn’t complain.
Installation was pretty straight forward and once installed I could not wait to get started as it was looking at that point to be exactly my style of game….until I actually tried to play….I say tried because it was very difficult to figure out what exactly was expected from me. There were few hints on how to get started at all. I ended up looking in the help (which is almost non existent) and looking online for explanation of how to play a game that was classified as 3+ (as in suitable for 3 year olds and above)!
Once I figured out how to play I quickly fell in love. I ended up playing for more than 6 hours on a Friday night after a whole week at work instead of just relaxing on the sofa in front of the TV. I could not help myself. And after few minutes I realised that most of the family were watching over my shoulder and trying to solve the puzzles and find the missing pieces as well. I can cope with people watching over my shoulder, but when arms started stretching to the screen and started shouting at me “look there, on the table”, “get this one from the bottle”, “did you check here”, “did you check there”; well you get the idea. So I told them off and promised them they can play after I’m done. That did the trick and I was left in peace to enjoy my game.
And I just could not leave it until I finished it. At the end after a long play session I expected something to be revealed, something big to happen, may be even a chance to visit a different planet. As I put the last piece of the puzzle I anxiously awaited… Nothing! I mean nothing! I was taken to a room with all the weird characters that I met during the game and there was one big wall with all the puzzles that I solved during the game. I mean EXACTLY the same puzzles. Then I thought may be I need to do them again and something will happen. So I did the first one and then went to next one and then went back to the first one to find that it did not stay solved like in the game! So basically that room at the end was just a place where you can go and do the same puzzles over and over again and nothing will happen. The game had no end! I was very disappointed. For something that I stayed late into the night to finish off just to find out there is no proper end it was very, very disappointing.
So it is a long story for The Tiny Bang Story but to make it short:
- Easy to install
- Hard to figure out how to play
- Great game with some very challenging puzzles
- Extremely disappointing end
P.S. The rest of the family now have their chance to play and there is never a moment when someone isn’t puzzling away. The game was suitable (with only a couple of exceptions) for my 5 year old son and for my 60 year old mum-in-law. It is definitely not just a children’s game and makes actually a very nice present for anybody (especially kids) as it contains all these freebies as well.
9 puzzled puzzlers out of 10