This = proper lovely. It’s a very short, incredibly charming browser-based puzzle game, starring that old indie staple, a cute robot. Familiar elements perhaps, but with a gorgeous, genuinely delightful execution. This is exactly the kind of game that should be played on a Friday lunchtime, leaving you with a warm and fuzzy feeling all weekend.
It’s made by Slovakian outfit OneClickDog, whose previous game, Kutuke, I shall eagerly check out next week. Where Little Wheel departs from the vast majority of browser-based puzzles games is:
a) it’s more or less a straight line with zero room for confusion, but maximum room for the charming joy of pressing buttons and watching things happen. This is, trust me, more than enough.
b) its remarkable art and music style, which may well owe a great debt to World of Goo, but by electing to use only silhouettes, really nails that living cartoon aesthetic.
I don’t want to say too much because I suspect I only dilute what’s a perfectly self-contained experience by doing so – so, go play.
Thanks to Several Noble Readers for mailing us about this.
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This was magnificent. Take that haters, I enjoyed this game.
I loved this so much. I actually wrote a little note thanking them and asking for more, please.
Charming game indeed. From the music to the animations where just fantastic.
It was a nice diversion for a few minutes, well done, in terms of story and character and design.
Barely a game, though. I really like the obvious hot-spotting, i wish escape the room games would do that.
“It’s barely a game.”
One could say that about Saomorost too, then.
One thing one might wonder though: Is it bad if it’s barely a game, or is that good? Also, is that relevant to what they were trying to do?
If you go in expecting a game, then you may find barely a game, and that observation would be fair. However, if they were offering an interactive story and you declare it barely a game because of your own expectations, then that’s another matter all together.
Expectations can ruin a lot of things, for example; if a person were to sit down for a bite to eat, they might expect a fruit dessert because that’s what they fancy. Then, if a chocolate dessert was placed in front of them — even if it happened to be the finest chocolate dessert in the world — they’re going to be disappointed and it’ll dampen their enjoyment of it. This would be in spite of whether they’d been told what to expect or not.
It may be barely a game, but as I’ve explained that’s not really relevant if it’s not supposed to be a game, regardless of one’s expectations. I find little gems like this to be absolute genius, and I wish they could stand by their own merits without being compared to games. To me, they’re interactive stories, akin to a graphical version of written interactive fiction.
And sometimes in IF, all that’s necessary is the occasional rudimentary input from those engaged with that IF, but at the end of hte day it’s still IF. This is similar, and I’d say it sits in its own genre as a kind of iconic visual interactive fiction, which sounds silly but it’s the only way I can think of putting it.
@mihor_fego
I disagree; this works /because/ nothing is fully fleshed out.
This and goo worked because it suggested a world rather then gave you endless detail.
This sets your own imagination running and that is, well should be, enough.
Which is the difficulty with that kind of story telling.
The less imagination the person being told the story has the less they enjoy it.
The narrative equivalent of “too long; didn’t read”
Cute, fun and didn’t drag on.
Stylistically it reminds me of ‘The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello’ which is an excellent short film by Anthony Lucas. You should watch it; unless you hate cinema, in which case you may continue chewing your side of mutton, spittle dripping and dangling dangerously on your sagging jowls as you scowl at the neighbour children preparing to berate them for their feckless ways, because ultimately you’re dead inside and you try to fill that hollow void with hate. I pity you.
Good call, Stompbox. A friend lent me his DVD of the Oscar-nominated shorts of the year when The Mysterious Geographic Explorations was nominated. I didn’t particularly like most of the other nominations, whether animated or not, but this one was stylistically fascinating, imaginative and didn’t go for the whole “man, this is, like, so deep, and personal, and poignant!” vibe that most of the other shorts had.
Hmmm…
First of all, I have to say that I do hate cinemas, but not cinematic work. A hearing condition has left me unable to enter something as noisy as a cinema without passing out, lots of fun that is. I wonder where that puts me?
Regardless of that, I looked the title up on YouTube and here it was, there were a few visual observations at first, such as that it seemed like a gothic version of Skies of Arcadia (with some elements being eerily similar) and that I loved Morello’s hair.
The more I watched it the more sylistic similarities I saw between that and Little Wheel, and it took but a few minutes to get me completely hooked right up until the end. I’m also so very, very pleased that it didn’t force an ending on us, and instead left that to the imagination.
For an ending probably would have been some forced tragedy in most cases, and that would’ve been depressing in such a way that it would overshadow the film. But the way it ended means that everyone can write their own epilogue, as did I. In mine, Morello survived and brought the creature back, and examination yielded a synthetic way to reproduce the cure, his wife was saved and they lived happily ever after. With no need to propagate the creature itself around the living colonies, there was no danger, and their World was a little better for it. Morello was vindicated from his past, accidental crime.
Predictable? Certainly, but I’m fond of predictably joyous endings.
Thanks for sharing, Stompbox.
That was cute.
I really liked it, had a smile on my face the whole way through.
Wulf – I find your interpretation unneccesarily complex for what was a throwaway observation.
@drewski
Unnecessary, you say? Well that’s imagination for you. And throwaway? I’d say that’s a bitter representation of not having noticed such an obvious hint yourself.
Indeed, I would posit that the designers placed little hints throughout the interactive story they wove to add detail and flavour. However, only those designers could tell us that for sure, and until then I admit that this is thoroughly subjective.
However, I’d say that the safe money would be with thinking that the designers would tell you the same thing. After all, this is a game that authors have been playing with their collective audience across various mediums for years; dropping hints at things that could be, so that an observant individual will spot them, and speculate about their nature. Thus leaving elements of the story open to the imagination and interpretation of the observer.
So to reiterate: I would imagine that the result would depend on which of us is correct; whether it was a hint added to the story to help the audience further extrapolate the nature of the World in which the story was set, or whether it was an amateurish mistake which had been overlooked (this, I would assume, would have to be your position).
I’m an optimist, so I’d rather believe it was the former, and that you’ve got egg on your face because you were looking for something to complain about or criticise, simply for the sake of doing so, and in the effort you picked something that I dare say anyone could have explained away easily.
With an effort like Little Wheel, I suppose one would have to scrape the barrel to pick out something wrong with it. But the problem with scraping the barrel is that you usually only get worthless scraps that really should have been left there.
But as I said, this is all subjective. I have my opinion, you have yours. Though I do hope that we get word from them, just so I can giggle about it.
Very cute. Reminds me of Portal with the whole ‘too simple to be fun’ debate.
I was racing back to mention Jasper Morello as well.
You can watch it here fully legit;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vORsKyopHyM
(though it’s not quite as cheerful as the above game)
Wulf – you’re taking this way, way too seriously.
I absolutely loved it. Too short.
It is absolutely NOT too short.
FACT 1: Perfect work means NO PART OF THE GAME is boring.
FACT 2: The ENTIRE game was good.
THEREFORE
FACT 3: Game is the PERFECT length.
Q.E.D.