When/Where/Why: Working out the origin of this one gave me a bit of a headache. Turns out I got it in something called “Northern Lights Indies Summer 2010”, a five game bundle that also came with Crayon Physics Deluxe, Saira, Plain Sight and Blueberry Garden (of last week’s fame but already owned). I paid US$20 for this bundle in July 2010 and let this be yet another reminder that ideas of what was considered a “deal” have changed significantly since. It’s frankly astonishing that anyone still makes money from games.
At the same time I also apparently bought Beat Hazard, which we’ve been over, and two packs of DLC for Borderlands, which we’ll get to, like, soon enough, because oh it’s the next game, how’s about that.
What/Who: Bob Came in Pieces is a 2D physicsy puzzle-platformer. You play as Bob, an alien call-centre worker who accidentally crash-landed on earth. Bob needs to find a particular piece of hardware in order to get home, a hyperdrive somethingarather, so you fly Bob from place to place in their little spaceship, looking for it. The game is divided into chapters, each of which (after the first couple) requires you to do some amount of envionmental puzzle solving in order to get to the exit. Each chapter also contains five other spaceship parts which you can collect (sometimes themselves hidden or requiring extra puzzle-solving to get to). The kicker is that these spaceship parts can be tacked on and off Bob’s spaceship at numerous spots throughout each level - pretty much at any time you have to solve a different puzzle, actually - so you have to kind of build and dismantle the spaceship as the situation changes.
It’s by Ludosity [official site], who are frommmm Sweden! (Fun Fact: this is the third game in a row by a Swedish developer, and the game before that sort-of pretended to be made by a Swedish developer. What does this tell us about Sweden, games and this part of the alphabet? Almost certainly nothing.) Ludosity have made quite a few games by now. I haven’t played any of the others, but I have heard of Card City Nights and Ittle Dew (heard of them, in fact, because I apparently own them). Bob Came In Pieces was Ludosity’s third game, and it came out in 2009.
Prior exposure to pieces: Never installed.
Duration: 4ish hours.
Finishment: I finished the 14 chapters that constitute the games normal adventure mode, hooray for me! I didn’t bother trying to speedrun any of the levels or to collect all the extra optional space-ship parts though. This game has a heap of achievements, probably for these very things. I only have 17 out of 81 of them.
Whole-some fun: Here we are, game number fifty, List Oriented’s half-century, and I feel blessed and lucky because this old indie was, despite my expectations, both enjoyable and doable.
Out of the blocks it looks a bit rubbish, dominated by large angular polygons and not a lot else, that awkward style that is neither old nor new, here nor there, suffering with time rather than retro chic. But by the end I came to be quite fond of the game’s environments and the shitty graphics that house them, having gone from wooded to slightly industrial to subterranean to snowy, all occasionally dotted with endearing background doodads, stick-figure cave drawing, homely nooks and crannies amid the large puzzle contraptions, other little splatters of personality. Maybe it’s the colours or lighting, I don’t know, but it often seems suggestive of warmth in what might otherwise be quite cold, lifeless, mechanised settings, and this warmth reaches deeper than you’d expect.
This is helped exponentially by the music, which is understated and simple but honestly pretty great. It’s all floating ambient synthwave, high notes climbing for the sky, yearning and optimistic. I mean, I -probably- wouldn’t play the game just to listen to the soundtrack, but it works well because it’s not easy to get sick of and the loops aren’t super obvious (at least, not in passive listening terms).
And then there’s the platforming AKA flying a tiny spaceship around, which is surprisingly stupid-good fun. Gravity and (ahem) thrust have been worked out so everything has a real weight to it, but given enough space and power the ship can build up some real reckless and joyful speeds. Needing to augment your ship with parts for different puzzles is less tedious than it sounds, too, with a lot of the extra parts being superfluous flotsam that really just seems to be there for the extra collectables rather than the practical utility, so you’re only really changing out a couple of main attachments and occasionally building like, e.g. an extra-long arm to solve a puzzle where you have to reach for a thing through a small gap.
Because of the physics, the ship becomes a lot harder to control when you start adding extra random parts on, which is discouragement enough from overcomplicating things. Some of the puzzles from the mid-game onwards require the use of a gravity ray, which is perennially awkward to use, with heavier items physically very difficult to pick up and manoeuvre into the small spaces the game sometimes demands. I found this annoying at first, but it’s one of those “the more you learn” situations, and it was eventually pretty satisfying when things did go according to plan.
I also enjoyed that the puzzles were on the easier side, at least so far as progression went (obviously I didn’t get all the collectables so there’s a lot that I didn’t solve and therefore can’t say much about). I won’t deny it. Sometimes it’s just nice to get things done. The levels themselves are pleasingly bite-sized. The game has a nice casual rhythm where you can jump in for half an hour, get a couple of levels done and then go do something else for a bit, until there’s no more game left and it’s time to write your blog post about it (or whatever).
Anyway: Fifty games! A little milestone for you and I. There’s still a long way to go, but we may as well pause a little here and observe this moment (much like how in cricket a batsman raises their bat when they reach fifty runs), because due to the longish nature of the next game and some other plans I have in the interim it might be a few weeks before I get to post again.
Two more things unrelated to this game or even games in general: One is that recently I put together and edited a bunch of music I recorded back in 2010 into an album, which I released last week. It’s insular, lo-fi bedroom pop and I understand that’s probably not your thing, but feel free to check it out if that is your thing. Sales so far suggest my music career poses no threat to my writing career, so don’t be too concerned.
The other thing is that Octopus Pie came to it’s conclusion today. Octopus Pie has been my favourite webcomic pretty much since I started reading it in 2007, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone. It portrays a lot of very relatable experiences of life as a twenty-something in subtly poignant and funny ways. I’m very sad that there won’t be any more of it, and excited to see what the author does next.
Borderlands is next on the list.
