A world full of cubes and obstacles are keeping best friends apart! It’s time to come to their rescue! I would like to thank Southend Interactive for providing a review copy of this game as it helped provide a wonderful night of gaming. I feel that game creators face the dilemma of making a puzzle game that hits just the right balance between difficulty and ease in solving a puzzle, but Southend seems to have had no issues with this in ilomilo. This game eases you into the difficulty and will soon having you scratching your head trying to figure out which way to go next. Let us get into the meat of this review!
The launch of the game immediately surrounds you with fun and cutesy music. The main menu is like a small soundboard that you can play around with to play a song along with the background music. There is even an achievement that you can get by doing this. Even with the music looping, it did not get to the point that it was grating on my nerves. During the game, you will find that the environment and interactive sounds fit the game perfectly. Even collecting gallery items is fun because you get to hear two toy soldiers make a funny trumpet sound. Yes, I know. Simple but effective things in a game that serve their purpose well make me happy! Like the gibberish dialogue you encounter.
I had nothing but praises to say about the graphics in this game. Not only are the characters well-made but the world is beautifully created. I never came across anything visually that made me stop and say, “Hmmmm, that’s not good.” The experience was seamless and everything felt naturally part of the game. Nothing but polished work comes across on the screen. When you finish a level in a chapter successfully, you get a red heart. If you finish the level and collect all collectable items in the level, you get a gold star. My only hiccup with the game was not having control over the zoom in/out. While it was nice to zoom all the way out to view the entire level, there were multiple times that I wished I could rotate the world fully and zoom in and out at will. I tell myself that if I had that capability, it would have helped me solve levels that I skipped that were stopping me from reaching the end of the game! Right……
Smoke and mirrors are all well and good, but what about the gameplay? You will not be disappointed. Besides switching back and forth ilo and milo to figure out the best way to get them together, the obstacles that you come across will have you working those grey cells. There will be a number of interactive cubes that you can pick up. They will help you fill empty spots or act as trap doors or rotating cubes that will allow you to have ilo or milo approach the puzzle from a different perspective. Need a cube to help you fly up a few cubes up? There’s one waiting around the corner for you to use.
On each level, you can collect various items like records (the vinyl kind), pictures and memory fragments that help unlock the extras for the game. You also come across mini-characters called Safkas. When you’ve rescued every safka of a specific color in a all levels of a chapter, a special bonus puzzle will be unlocked for each of the three Safkas. If they are wearing hats in a puzzle, that means you’ve already collected them. Usually when you have finished a puzzle in a game, the last thing you want to do is play it again. But with a leaderboard that ranks how many cubes you have traveled total between ilo and milo for each puzzle, you are driven to find the shortest path between them and see if you can discover it. Of course if you are a collector like me, the first attempt at the puzzle will not help you in this endeavor as you are chasing those five memory fragments on the other side of the screen.
Even though you don’t have to complete every single puzzle in each chapter to progress, the main game does feel a tad bit short. There is an 8-bit game included that called ilomilo Shuffle and a DLC planned in the near future. ilomilo Shuffle has you controlling both ilo and milo at the same time with the D-pad while you try to collect safkas and little white cubes. Of course, the ground underneath them are continuously transforming and disappearing.
So the game lived up to my expectations based on the trailer and pictures I had seen. Nothing but high praises for this game and a must-pickup if you are a puzzle game fan. I would recommend this for a lazy Saturday but it will hardly be lazy with your brain running on full cylinders. And to steal Sebastian’s word (in-game character), I was “amazimpressed” by this game!
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