Engimo Review

    Enigmo is the last game in the Beatshapers bundle I got on PSN that also contained Wizorb, BreakQuest, Canabalt, and Galcon Labs. Not a bad bundle for $7 or however much it was.

     Enigmo is a puzzle game of sorts where water drops from an inverted tank in one part of a 2d level and you must guide it into a receptacle at another part of the level by placing objects that manipulate the water droplets. Some pieces bounce or launch the droplets at high speed. Others let the liquid slide along or deflect it like a piece of steel. One piece acts like a sponge that soaks up the liquid until it drips out of the bottom. After a few stages, you start to have to manage lava and/or oil in addition to the water. The difference between these liquids is mostly cosmetic. All of the liquids (1, 2, or all of them can be in any given stage) must end up with 40 drops in their respective receptacles for the stage to end. The flows into these receptacles have to be continuous, as liquid quickly evaporates out of the receptacles if the flow doesn't continue. This stops you from using the same pieces to divert different liquids. You can't just put 40 drops of water in its spot and then use all those same pieces on the lava. You need to ration your limited parts.

     When a stage begins, you can survey the level by moving the analog stick around before pressing cross to start the stage. Once you start, the water starts flowing, and a bonus gauge in the corner starts counting backward from a high number. If you can beat the stage before that number runs out, you will get that score, plus a bonus for any parts you didn't use. This gives an incentive to move fast and be efficient, but there is no penalty for not doing so other than receiving a score of 0 for the stage. I also got some random score bonuses at some stages, not sure why. Along the left side of the stage is a bank of all the parts available to you for the level. There are eight different types, and you get a different mix in every level. Bizarrely, the game doesn't tell you how many of each part you get. You often have multiple copies of certain parts in a level, but you don't know that until you use a part and then see that it is still available in your bank.

     You cycle through the parts in the bank and parts that you have already placed on the level with the d-pad. This is a little frustrating as it seems to jump around randomly a bit from the objects in the level to the bank. Often you will want to place an object from the bank way over on the right side of the screen. To do so, you'll need to scroll all the way through all the objects you've already placed to your left to get to the bank. Then you must drag the object all the way back to the right side of the screen. There has to be a better way to do this. When you have selected the object you want to place or move, pressing cross puts you in edit mode (as opposed to view mode, where you can look around but aren't moving any objects). While in edit mode you move the object you have selected with the left analog stick. You can move it very slowly with the d-pad for fine adjustments. You rotate it left or right with L1 and R1, respectively. You can change how finely you rotate an item be holding triangle to make rotation slower and square to make it faster. I had to do this a few times to get things just the way I wanted them. By default, it is set to rotate at the fastest setting. Pressing cross again places the object and switches you back to view mode. Seeing how objects will work when placed is a snap since liquid dynamically interacts with objects as you move them around and place them. This is very slick.

     Solutions to these levels often involve placing bouncer parts that send streams of liquid flying around at high speeds. You typically need to set a few of these at the correct angles to get the liquid where it needs to go. There is also a cool part that shoots water droplets out like a cannon, although you must set the liquid up to fly into it at the right angle for it to work properly. In levels that include oil or lava, you always start with just the water dripping. You must make the water continuously hit switches to make the oil and lava start and keep dripping. There are also force fields in many levels that need to be deactivated by making a liquid go through a color coded hoop. There are also a few types of surfaces that make up the level itself that you need to work with. Some reflect liquid, letting it bounce or slide along the surface. One type absorbs it, making your stream disappear. All these elements mixed together in different ways make each level an interesting experience. They don't exactly feel unique though. Each one has you chart a convoluted path for each liquid you are dealing with until you finally have everything in place. There are 50 stages, and they all feel somewhat same-ish, with a few exceptions. In general, you use the same techniques and overcome the same obstacles in each. It would be great if a few more concepts were introduced throughout the game.              Even the difficulty doesn't go up all that much. Once you get about half-way through the game, each level is about the same difficulty: 1 to 5 minutes of mild brain teasing. None of the stages are very hard, and, disappointingly, the last stage is quite easy. Most of the stages aren't easy either, fortunately, but none of them will boggle your brain the way you might expect later levels in a game like this to. Super hard stages in puzzle games like this can be frustrating, but very rewarding. Both that frustration and that rewarding feeling are mostly missing from this game.

     The game does pull off the feeling that you are putting together a unique solution or even breaking the rules. And you probably are in many case. I believe there are multiple solutions to many of the puzzles, and because it is physics based, weird things can happen that aren't going to happen to everyone. It's often the sign of a great puzzle game when you feel like you're cheating to get things done, and I had that feeling a few times during Enigmo as the physics guided the liquid into strange paths and situations.

     The graphics are really great. They are simple shapes and blocks, but they are all rendered in 3d. They easily could have been 2d objects, but as the camera pans around, you can see they have depth. They even look great on an HD tv, with the exception of a few of the menus. Even the big background textures look good on an HD tv despite this being a Mini. It looks like you are inside of a giant silo or something. The lava is especially amazing looking. It's glowing so bright it looks like it's going to burn through your screen.

     Many stages in Enigmo are impressive looking when you complete them. You often have long streams of droplets of several liquids bouncing crazily around a large stage. There are hundreds of droplets on screen, all flying through the air and eventually landing where they need to go. It looks like a giant Rube Goldberg machine that you created. A few days after I beat the game, I came back and completed one of the larger stages just to see the spectacle again.
     It seems like there is a limit to how many drops the game can draw. If liquid starts pooling up somewhere so that too many droplets are onscreen, the game will sometimes compensate by stopping or slowing the dripping of one of the liquids. Also, if you shoot liquid super high into the air, it sometimes will evaporate instead of coming back down. But, the game never has slowdown even when there are a ton of rapidly moving droplets, so I guess it's a tradeoff. It's annoying though when the stream you are working with starts to dry up so you can't clearly see how you are manipulating it.

     There is a bit of a bug where sometimes liquid will not interact with any objects in certain situations. This is often when it is bouncing off of a stationary part of the level in a strange way. This forces you to change what you are doing, which is annoying. This only happened to me in about 4 levels though, so not too bad. The game also annoyingly auto-saves at the end of every level, which freezes the screen. It says press cross to go to the next level, but you have to wait on the frozen screen for a bit before you can actually press cross, which is annoying. While I'm complaining, I'll also mention that at the beginning of each level there is a quick fly-by of the whole level that is un-skippable and totally useless. Also, it's a missed opportunity to not have the camera fly around the level on the z-axis at some point, like when you beat the level. That would be really cool, and the levels are already rendered in 3d, so why not? Also if you go to the level select menu, you can't go back to the main menu; you have to pick a level. Also, you pointlessly unlock levels as you go. Why? One more thing; if you beat the last level, you still get a prompt to press cross for the next level. If you press it, it starts level 50 over again.

     While you play, there is some subtle ambient music in the background. It's really good; sounds like a Mum song. Each droplet that hits an object makes a ticking sound. Just like real water dripping, this can be annoying in some levels, and there's no sound options, so you can't turn it down. Just like real life, it can also sound cool in some stages if the beat is right.

     Enigmo took me about 3 hours to beat. It kind of dragged in the middle, but learning all the concepts at the beginning and doing all of the more challenging (but still not that hard) stages at the end was fun. It needed more concepts and ideas to really be great, but it was enjoyable. It's a mediocre game, tier 1.