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dkirschner's GNOG (PC)
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| [February 15, 2021 07:15:36 AM]
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This was a freebie somewhere but looked cute and quirky. GNOG is a tactile puzzle game where you solve little scenes. All scenes have a front and a back. Usually there are a couple things to manipulate on the front, but you have to spin the scene around and open its back panel, revealing the interior where the real puzzle is. Solve it and you spin the scene back around and clickity click a button or something on the front to finish. You get a cute animated win screen and unlock the next puzzle.
For example (and they aren't all this weird), in the most memorable level for me, the scene is a bird on a log, with worms popping out like in whack-a-mole. There are little stumps that you can click for the bird to land on, near where worms come out, and the bird will fly to the stumps and try to eat a worm (if it's currently there). I caught a worm and the bird flew to a hole in the stump and stuck its head in. I didn't know what was going on, and this was a lot for a puzzle front, so I flipped it around, opened the back panel, and realized that the bird was a momma bird and she was regurgitating the worm for her babies. You've got to rotate the thumbstick to spin a wheel and reveal bird eggs, which you click on to hatch. Once you've got a chick, you have to click and drag the momma bird's mouth to angle the food at the baby. Then click the baby to eat the food. It grows and becomes an adult bird.
I did this for all 5 eggs (catching a new worm each time), but nothing happened. I realized that some of the birds were singing and that clicking on a bird toggles its singing on and off. I clicked around and realized that some sing on key and others sing off key. I made the three on-key birds sing and it triggered whatever it was on the front of the puzzle so that I could finish the scene.
Other puzzles similarly proceed by you clicking around on things to figure out what they do. But the clicking isn't just randomly hoping something does something. It always makes sense, and there are often clues in the scene for how to sequence buttons and this or that. Other memorable scenes included the submarine and the robber (both of which were much bigger than the others). In the robber scene, for example, you have to help a robber steal money from four or five different houses, solving a little puzzle piece in each one. It was clever and I liked the playfulness of being a silly robber vacuuming up big gold coins. Puzzles are always fair, can be a little tricky, but thankfully are not terribly difficult. You have to play with the scene, so GNOG captures the spirit of like a toy box, or like those little tactile sets for children. I'm still a little peeved at the last puzzle though. I figured out that you have to line up a bunch of concentric circles, but I was trying to do it on the wrong plane and the game would not let me snap the last one into place. I finally looked it up and saw that I just had to put them on a different plane.
The only downside to GNOG is the shitty, shitty "rotate" control. I played with a gamepad, so this involves spinning LS around to turn gears, dials, and the like. The command is so finnicky, really hard to control how things turn. This was super frustrating on the submarine level, where you have to turn a knob to fill the sub with water, then quickly turn it off at just the right time. It took me like 10 minutes to finally get it right. It's really frustrating knowing exactly what you are trying to do but being unable to do it, not because your skills are not sharp enough (as in a challenging platformer), but because the input doesn't work well. Still, GNOG is cute and charming and totally worth a couple hours of relaxing puzzle solving!
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dkirschner's GNOG (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Friday 12 February, 2021
GameLog closed on: Sunday 14 February, 2021 |
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