By John Walker on March 31st, 2010 at 12:42 pm.
Oh my goodness, there’s a new Hoshi Saga game. And it’s in colour. But let me explain. If you’ve been following carefully you’ll have noticed that every now and then I remember to check the site of Yoshio Ishii, NekoGames, to see if anything new has appeared. Because when something has, it’s always worth a look. And this time: a fourth Hoshi Saga, the blissfully beautiful micro-game collections that ask you to find a star.
Once again, despite the extreme simplicity of the puzzles, each is a pleasure. Each causes me to offer a broad smile as I see what he’s done, or spot how to solve it. And a few create an explanation of, “Oh! That’s so clever!” A few more tricky ones appear at the end of the rows and columns, but as with Hoshi Saga 3, it’s hard not to wish for some tougher challenges along the way. A few where you can get stuck for a while.
But as it is, this remains completely delightful. And it’s extremely pretty, the textures and colours used wisely, carefully. Ishii is an extremely smart man, remarkably inventive. These little morsels are a real treat.
prolly not intentional but that picture is an autostereogram.
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Man I love these games, so magical and satisfying. All games should match those qualities!
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finished, not so difficult but nice style.
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Yeah, this part was disappointingly easy.. but cool nonetheless.
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Kind of nice, not really tough,m but somehow I managed to get stuck on level 13
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Goddamn murphy’s law, seconds after posting that, I passed lvl 13.
>_<
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At first I thought stage 21 was stupid, but then I let it run in the background and forgot about it, until, a minute ago, I heard that “ding” and that made me happy. :)
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you can manipulate the time of the clock by clicking on the bottom left corner.
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Pleasant.
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Easy, perhaps, but what I love about this is that every level constitutes a really good, novel idea.
I can’t count the number of times I want to scream because a huge team of professional developers with money-hat levels of funding couldn’t think of a single unique idea for a puzzle, and so I’m again solving Pipemania, the riddle of the lying guardians or the towers of fucking Hanoi – all the while having my suspension of disbelief aggressively violated by the game’s seeming suggestion that these sore-thumb clichés can be seamlessly integrated into whatever fantasy or sci-fi context I was just getting comfortable in (yes, Bioware, I am most definitely looking at you when typing this).
So yes. This is lovely.
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@BooleanBob
Amen
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These games are very nice.
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Ha! That was really rather neat. Best thing about it for me was that when comparing any two levels, the originality of both stood out, there were no two puzzles that were really similar. It reminded me very much of Windosill, because in that each room was very unique and not at all like the others. And though each puzzle took only a few moments (barring one) to solve, I can see that quite a few hours of work clearly went into them, and I appreciate the effort. This is the sort of thing I’d buy if there were a lot of them, all bundled into one and coupled into a nice interface, it’s a great thing to pass a little time with.
Anyway, that said, these were absolutely delightful and each brought a smile to my face too, well, all but one to be completely honest. The one where I had to click stars to create constellation lines in order to reveal the star got me, but only because I couldn’t click fast enough for a while in order to get it, that was perhaps the only one that frustrated me, the rest I breezed through and had a great time with.
Thanks for sharing this, John. That was a wonderful few minutes and I’m going to share it with others.
Speaking of silly, fun little things, Treasure Island Online might be worth a mention, to see if we can get any RPS people in there. Though I do worry such an influx would break it or cause chaos with the clicks. Still, might be fun.
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Much easier than the other Hoshi Saga games, but still great.
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These may be simple and easy, but consider the many different ways Yoshio has found to hide a star. That’s a realy sign of ingenuity if you ask me. And it shows in many little ways.
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