Life Goes On Review | Try to see the bright side of it
If you are like me, you probably enjoy a wide variety of games.
Sometimes they are action filled, others require strategic thinking and others more immerse yourself in a fantastical world.
From time to time, I just want a straight forward puzzle with the only thing in my mind being the puzzles themselves and I got that with Life Goes On.
Aesthetics
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The overall texture and lighting have a very flat feeling
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The 3d graphics used are not very pretty to see, in fact they are a bit bland, uninteresting even, they don't give any kind of unique flavor to the visuals at all.
The animations don't add a lot, they are competent, the idling ones are a bit cute, but they don't convey any kind of unique personality.
There isn't any kind of voice acting in the game, except for the death sounds of the knights.
The soundtrack is nice to listen to, but it has a weird "busy" feeling to
it, like if each instrument was following its own rhythm instead of a
consistent melody. It doesn't sound cacophonic, it's not bad to hear, but the inconsistency may not sit well
with some.
Game Mechanics
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The core theme of sacrifice is experienced constantly |
The title is a puzzle game with minor platforming elements. The main scope of each level is to figure out one or more solutions to different puzzles. The core aspect of the game is to sacrifice the knights to allow successive ones to reach the cup at the end. This message is expressed immediately in the first level, with your knight falling into a pit full of spikes, killing him instantly, but at the same time creating a safe platform to jump on for the next knight and continue the adventure.
This creates macabre and ludicrous scenarios in which one knight must use the corpses of his fallen brethren to reach the goal.
The puzzles themselves are quite neat, they made me think carefully and gave a satisfying feeling once I managed to solve them.
Correlated to the puzzles, there are additional challenges to make the things even more interesting, such as beating a level without losing too many knights, beating a level under a time limit or trying to feed one of your knights to a little hairy monster called Jeff, adding a puzzle with an extra degree of difficulty in comparison to the other one in a level.
There isn't much reward in beating the extra challenges tough, the
player gets new hats and weapons, both only having aesthetic purposes, plus achievements of course.
The developers have done a good job at balancing the amount of new devices introduced and the familiarity the player has to reach with these tools in order to use them at their full potential. Some are more intriguing than others, like transforming one of your knights in a hostile zombie so that he would move at a different time and synchronize with the player's overall strategy, or freezing one of your knights to have an improvised sled.
Overall, the puzzles are fun and stimulating.
Narrative
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I've so little to show ... here is the description for the horse
mask, I guess
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The king knight desires to obtain the Cup of Life, he uses his infinite supply of knights to achieve that.
This is literally the whole story.
Yeah, don't approach this game expecting any kind of narrative.
Recommendation:
Life is Goes On is a cute puzzle game that may be ugly to look at, but it's very fun to play.
Available on Steam.
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