It's a collection of mini-games you can play either one at a time or in a marathon-campaign (play them all for a overall score/ranking) where each mini-game's gameplay is driven by drawing circles on the touch screen. In some games it's frantic drawing, others are slower and require more precision, and so on. But, you're always physically doing the same thing (at most there might be a separate button to press - from what I played).
What is really neat is that each mini-game is super different from the next in terms of theme and presentation and goal. Even though you're always doing circles... it's like Warioware in that sense. Fewer minigames, and they last longer, and they all have the same interaction - but thematically all over the place: keep a businessman straight in a train car that turns sharply, do spins/acrobatics as a skateboarder in a half-pipe, spin characters who are wrapped in clothes/fabric to remove the clothes/fabric, rotate a bubble-bobble cannon to shoot bubbles at enemies, rotate a sushi conveyor belt so the patrons get what they want to eat, and so on. They're all really wild, different, wacky, and fun....
...and I sucked at most of them. The first game I played I scored 1st place - it was all downhill from there getting mediocre ratings (that are shown as insults) on pretty much everything else.
I played this for a few weeks and was only interested because I had heard about it at GDC. The game is, in a nutshell, a F2P version of vampire survivors with the shiny turned up to 11 BUT also a grindiness that is a bit tiresome? I eventually got bored, but I realized that maybe the first 5 minutes of the game, or so, was tapping on stuff to collect rewards and things that had accumulated since I last played. And all that started to get a bit tiring.
It's my understanding that the game is super successful in terms of making money and so on, and I can see why - it's a huge progression chain of items and stats and things you can increase, there's events, and different types of events and so on. What I enjoyed the most, to be fair, is that the play sessions are shorter than Vampire Survivors - you basically play against a timer, so if you're doing great, and beat the level it'll never take longer than 5 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever the length is. That being said, that's where some of the grind comes in, you need to get gear, improve gear, etc. that separate from the in-level weapon upgrades and pickups to boost your chances of success.
Fun? Yes. Not sure if I'll go back to it though...
Ok, the level creator is pretty cool - and much more sophisticated than it deserves to be, there's different templates for the kind of level you want to make and more! You can have a few saved on the cart - and my guess (didn't check) is that you can send them to your friends? (probably requiring that they have the game?)
So, I made a simple level where you had to guess 3 different words (concepts?) in a row. I was also able to write one hint (not like the 3 hints you usually get in the game), but was not able to figure out how to get players started - as in, give them an instruction so they know where to start from...I don't think it's the name of the level? (which is what I did) But still.
I don't get the impression that you can make levels of the kind in the game - just simpler ones...but I could be wrong!
I'm really enjoying this. I think I'm 10 cases in or so - and it's stayed as interesting as the first few cases, which is a good thing since sometimes these kinds of games can sort of fall apart when the difficulty or complexity ramps up. So far so good here! (and yes, difficulty and complexity have ramped up, but are still what I would call reasonable - wherein the solution to each case makes sense and I've been able to figure it out even after some mistakes or missed clues).
What has impressed me most, in terms of the design, is how the game handles clues and goals. Each case consists of one or more screens (if there are more than one they're connected spatially such that it makes sense) and in the scenes are object/locations that (when they have a blinking star) you click on to look at things, get clues, etc. I call this the observation/clue gathering view and generally what you want to do first is click on everything clickable to populate the other view - this is the "solving" view (the game has another pair of words for the difference between these views, and you can toggle between them easily).
The solving view consists of a single screen broken up into two or more panels. The left-most panel is a sentence/pargraph that's sort of like a mad-lib page. There some words but most of it is blank spaces you must fill with clues you drag/drop from either the other panels or your "clue collection" section at the bottom of the screen. Each panel in this view is a goal for you to complete - with the final goal the left-most panel which is a description of what happened in the case (e.g. "John Smith went to the library to get a gun he then used to stab Jack Smith with in the pantry"). The other panels are sub-goals to the main one, and once you filled out all the slots - if correct - they turn green indicating that progress has been made. It's sort of like you're collecting notes and figuring things out - before you're ready for the final reveal.
The panels serve both as intermediary goals that are evident to the player and a way to "check" your progress by verifying your sense-making of the clues gathered so far. It's a neat form of scaffolding I don't think I've seen before and it really prevents you from going off on a completely wrong track (while also guiding you towards a solution, which might make things too easy for some?)
The cases are all connected, and there's characters that carry over from one to the next - but, they are all self-contained in that prior knowledge helps, but isn't necessary.
I've found I can't really do more than one or two cases a day (the first one doesn't really count, it's so short) because I get a bit tired. BUT, I've enjoyed the process of sort of "snacking" on them... I wonder how many more there are? (the trophy list is probably a dead giveaway, since so far I've gotten a trophy for each case)
