Voxelized (beta 0.9.6, 2015) & Journey of the Light (2015)
Genre: Sandbox, Puzzle
Developer: Lord Kres
Price: £1.59, Not currently available on Steam
Voxelised is a shameless early access Minecraft ripoff. Whilst it may seem harsh to state this so bluntly and in such an undipolmatic manner, Voxelized is far more than deserving of this lack of courtesy. When it works, it’s an unoriginal block-building game that looks suspiciously like a pre-packaged gamemaker asset pack (sort of a prebuilt example) called Block Engine that’s been locked into an 800x600 resolution and thrown out onto the Steam Store in the hope that somebody would buy it. In this case you’re given a small world in which you can place and remove cubic blocks with a variety of very simplistic batterns. It’s basically a big, empty Lego set, if you’ve somehow found yourself reading this without any context for as to what Minecraft is. Of course, I found that most of the time it just freezes up whilst generating worlds instead, causing the desktop to get stuck in 800x600 resolution until manually reverted.
Of course, when I visited the game’s community forums to see if this was a common problem, I found something far more interesting about Voxelized, and that is that it was developed by the same one-man dev team as ‘Journey of The Light’, a game that was infamously pulled from Steam last year after it was outed as essentially being a confidence trick.
You see, Journey of the Light was a game that advertised itself as being a seven-chapter puzzle game so difficult that you may never even beat the first level. Of course, the scam there was that, despite the claims of the developer, there was only one level, which had no win conditions. In fact, the level was simply an art pack designed for tower defense games purchased from the Unity Store for around $65, around which the player rolled a ball. The ‘E’ button toggled all of the lights in the level, which the developer claimed was an important part of solving the puzzle. I suspect that the developer may have gotten away with this clever rouse for longer, with players simply giving up and assuming that the game had beaten them, had it not been for the fact that games are incredibly easy to datamine. A quick examination of the game’s files showed that all of the levels were the same and that that the game was programmed to show an intro and to allow players to toggle the lights and nothing else.
Fear any developer that puts their pre-alpha software into early access and then immediately asks the community what they want it to be. Not only does it imply that the developer has absolutely no original ideas of their own, but it’s also an indicator of a lack of skill. Fear also any developer that claims to have created a puzzle too hard to solve, as not only is designing puzzles that lack logic and reason a very poor approach to game development, you might just find that the game you’ve purchased was never designed to be solved, and never will be. If you find a developer offering both, run for the hills.
How long did I play? - 0.2 hours each
Did I finish it? - N/A.
Would I play it again? - No.