Tidalis

Puzzle games are a unique beast unto themselves, mainly because what defines them to be compared to one another is a bit hard to find. Games like Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Puyo Puyo spring to mind, but so do titles like Professor Layton and Big Brain Adacemy. All of these titles stimulate the mind, but do so in rather different ways, with the ilk of Tetris relying on reflex decisions to handle a problem, while Big Brain and Layton step back for a moment and require a bit of contemplative thinking. In my opinion, the best of the genre is Tetris Attack – a game that combines the reflexive excitement of Tetris with the methodical strategizing of Layton. Therefore, it gives me a lot of pleasure and pride seeing a game like Tidalis, which tries to combine both frantic gameplay and strategic planning for a puzzle tour de force. The end product, however, is a medley of good intentions that never quite pan out in the way the developers were expecting.

Tidalis isn’t a very story-intensive game, but what’s there is cute and serviceable for a puzzle game. The main character crashes a ship on a strange island, and feels compelled to solve random puzzles he finds for no good reason. Eventually, some cartoonish-looking inhabitants find this main character and banter in front of the hero, challenging him to solve puzzles for them. There’s some cute back-and-forths between such deep and exciting characters as Pickles the Imp-Thing, Bubba the terribly fat balloon loving child-thing, and the mysterious and evil Dr. Wiggles, but the overall plot is very much just filler and an excuse to have a fun, light-hearted story. Occasionally there are some good jokes thrown in there, and the designs for some of the characters are very nice, resembling a kind of cross between Tim Burton’s stop-motion works and Saturday morning cartoon characters, but these scenes are ultimately forgettable and add little to nothing. Considering that story is insignificant in a puzzle game, this won’t matter too much, but the elements of some witty banter are there, and I feel that the development team could think of how to make these characters play off of each other better in future projects.

Tidalis features a unique twist on the traditional gameplay of puzzle games, owing some inspiration to titles like Tetris Attack and Columns, but with its own unique twist. It takes place on a grid eight blocks wide and twelve blocks high, with one block falling in each of the eight columns occasionally. Tidalis then takes a cue from Pipe Dream-like mini-games, such as the hacking game from the original Bioshock, in how the blocks are arranged and systematically eliminated from the grid. By clicking a block, it will send out a beam of light in the direction that it’s pointing, moving up to three blocks in whatever direction it was pointed in. If it hits another block of the same color, it will change direction based on the hit block’s position for three more blocks. Rinse and repeat until it does not hit a block of the same color or hits the edge of the grid, and hit three or more of the same-colored blocks in one go to eliminate them from the board. It’s a slightly more complicated concept than the ‘match stuff of the same color in a row’ formula that most puzzle games follow, but it’s still simple enough that it can easily become addictive. Best of all is the fact that Tidalis does feature a combo system, where if a block is eliminated, the block above it will fall into its place and automatically release a stream. This is the best kind of way to utilize a puzzle game system, making a player have to scope out the entire board and see how their actions will affect it as a whole, rather than just looking for simple chains of a single color. In this regard and the basic core of the gameplay, Tidalis succeeds and thrives.

It’s a bit of a shame, then, that Tidalis seems very indecisive and insecure with itself. Unlike traditional puzzle games, where the main gameplay element is just repeated again and again with higher speed, more difficult AI opponents, or more variation in the block/color types, Tidalis decides to mix up the gameplay at multiple turns, to very limited success. There are a few interesting game modes here and there, such as Zen mode where the grid is permanently filled and the player just has to focus on getting as large of a combo as possible without the threat of time, or Frenzy where both blocks dropping from above and the speed of the streams released from blocks is put into double time, but the majority of ideas Tidalis presents are gimmicks that make the game more difficult and overall less interesting. For instance, the ‘Gravitron’ mode, where streams are affected by gravity, or the ‘Featherweight’ mode, where streams are affected by… the, erm… opposite of gravity. Both of these modes cause streams to curve at odd angles, making it very difficult to see patterns in blocks that would, in a normal mode, be very straightforward. In theory, this is a clever way to change up gameplay without altering the core mechanics of the game, forcing players to think in a different way. In practice, however, the grid just does not accomodate for these changes, and oftentimes the mechanic just gets in the way of being able to pull off large combos. It’s not exclusive to changes in gravity, either – there’s occasionally a gimmick for ‘Wind’ where wind will randomly pick up in-game, causing a stream to be affected by it, as well as ‘Water’, where the bottom of the grid will fill with water and cause blocks to float up toward the top, only being eliminated when a block of a certain color touches it. These gimmicks just serve as a frustration that gets in the way of the core elements of the gameplay – being able to quickly react and build up large combos of blocks. Trying to learn work-arounds for game modes is just tedious busy-work in comparrison.

The most frustrating element of Tidalis, however, is that it allows gimmick blocks to appear. These blocks appear in the grid and have a variety of effects. For instance, wooden blocks won’t allow streams to pass through them, and can only be eliminated if an adjacent block colored red is eliminated. Sun Blocks and Moon Blocks can only connect to each other in an alternating pattern, and stop any streams that are let out by the same type of block. Stone Blocks don’t let streams pass through them and can only be eliminated if they make it to the bottom of the grid. Conceptually, these would just add some difficulty to the game. However, block layout is randomized every time a puzzle is started, making getting these blocks out of the way a huge hassle. Generally the game is nice and will help in getting rid of them, putting reds near wooden blocks and not stacking four different colors underneath a stone block, but it’s easy to, in a matter of seconds. Just one or two inconveniently placed blocks can end up causing a large portion of the grid to be inaccessible. Working around these gimmick blocks tends to be an exercise in frustration, adding little to the experience.

As these features seem to be optional, I could normally dismiss these gimmcks as just failed add-ons and try to enjoy the heart and soul of the puzzle game. However, the game’s featured story mode has a solely linear progression, often having massive stretches where it switches from one gimmick to another. Occasionally there will be an interesting challenge that simply uses the mechanics of the game, such as “don’t eliminate more than ten green blocks, but clear one hundred blocks from the grid total.” These challenges are very interesting and very enjoyable, as they’re able to creatively use the game engine in order to set up a unique challenge. Yes, it does block off certain areas of the grid from use, but careful manipulation of blocks will allow the player to work around the problem, as opposed to the gimmick blocks and their sole purpose of getting in the way. However, the game tends to mix these creative challenges with the gimmick blocks, creating requirements such as “Clear 150 blocks while clearing less than 8 wooden blocks”. While careful manipulation is possible in this instance, it still blocks off large sections of the board and, worse off, discourages being able to make long combos just due to the fact that such a large portion of the grid will be hard to avoid or manipulate. And, again, I can handle a few of these gimmick puzzles; it’s just that the game hauls a lot of them out, one after the other, occasionally mixing it with something like ‘Gravitron’ or a line-clear mode. The single-player aspect of this game definitely could have benefitted by having something akin to a Professor Layton-like progression, where certain sets of puzzles open up based on how many puzzles you’ve cleared, and solving certain puzzles will advance the story. In this way, the more frustrating mechanics could still be played with, but not required in most instances.

Tidalis is, overall, a product that wants to be the end-all of puzzle games and falls flat just before the finish line in almost all areas. It has a creative main mechanic that uses a tried-and-true formula, but a lot of gimmicks that hamper it. It has a cute story with an interesting ambiance from both a graphical and musical standpoint, creating this sort of alien feel with a reggae spin on it, but the linear progression of the puzzles just doesn’t compliment it at all. The writing needs a bit of polish, and more thought really needed to go into the gimmicks, as very few of them have any lasting impact. The multiplayer in this title is fair and functional, but the game tends to work a bit better in a less competitive environment where a player can just figure out how they want to tackle the blocks they’re given. Therefore, the cooperative elements and versus elements just tend to not mesh well with the overall feel of the game. Tidalis itself, at its core value, is a fine puzzle game with an addictive nature, something that a lot of puzzle games fail to accomplish. In that regard, it is a very good game. However, the surrounding features, lack of polish in areas that really need them, and linear progression make the product suffer to the point where I can only recommend it if one is bored of Tetris and Tetris Attack, as opposed to a game that could rival their infinitely addictive nature.

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