It’s been some time since we featured a puzzle “Friday Game” so I decided to present to you Puzzle Moppet this week. This game was “opened” recently and is now available free of price due to the lack of sales and interest in the game. Is Puzzle Moppet a game that simply sucks, or is it all a marketing failure from the developer side?
The first thing that I want from a puzzle game, is the puzzles to begin in-game and not at the installation part. Puzzle Moppet met my expectations offering both a very simple installer in which all I had to do was press enter, and the Desura way to install it.
Straight in to the game, you control a moppet that fell from the sky on a platform. I have no clue how and why this happened and I don’t really think it matters much in this kind of games. The platform you are onto consists of fixed and movable blocks. The aim of the game is to drive the moppet to a little hurricane that is placed somewhere in the platform and be teleported to the next platform.
You can move blocks to clear your path, or put them where you need them to be in order to proceed. There are different kind of blocks that can be used in different ways. For example, at some point you will find blocks made of ice that slide till they find an obstacle when pushed.
As the moppet can’t jump, you will have to use elevators to travel between blocks of different height, while you will also find some tractor beams similar to Portal’s that you must use to your benefit somehow…
[youtube]http://youtu.be/7BZmhlcPdDU[/youtube]
I have to admit that this is a game without story, without feelings, without the astonishing 3D graphics and the atmospheric music, BUT it doesn’t need any of these because it has the one thing that every puzzle game is trying to achieve and that is the enjoyable puzzle design.
I found myself solving and traveling from one puzzle to the other non-stop as Puzzle Moppet offered more difficult and at the same time more intriguing puzzle problems. It encapsulates that element of the “impossible to solve at first sight, but interesting to think about the puzzle deeply”.
So, why did it fail at first place? Its price was 14.95 USD, and no one is going to pay that price for a game that its main worth and value doesn’t show if you don’t play it pass the trial version. Too expensive for no apparent reason. Whatever the case…you can now enjoy it completely free of charge!
