I know there are hundreds of brand new, great and absolutely wild games to be found over at the latest Global Game Jam, yet, having played through more than a hundred, I couldn’t help but urge you to take a look at just one for now. The short but excellent Mango Blue is well worth your time.
For starters, it looks absolutely lovely, with its colourful isometric graphics, and a hefty and truly woolly orangutan as its protagonist. I do love orangutans. Even when they aren’t humorous librarians, Mango Blue shows that they can make for brilliant heroes. This particular orangutan seems to be trying to escape from a lab.
Making a run for it involves a not particularly traditional combination of pointing-and-clicking, platforming, puzzle solving and the reading of walkthroughs, which the game is kind enough to provide for itself. Yes, walkthroughs.
Mango Blue introduces incredibly obscure puzzles you cannot hope to solve on your own and builds an incredibly smart, fourth wall breaking walkthrough mechanic that has you discovering pages filled with hints in order to progress. Innovation and humorous effect aside, this is a brilliant idea, expertly implemented and is reason enough to play through the game.
Besides that, the surreal world make this fun and unique experiment an absolute joy to play through. There’s also a rare chance to play with the colours of squids.
28/01/2015 at 11:17 MLM says:
Avast gives a threat level warning of “high” for this game’s file Mango_Blue_GGJ2015.zip
28/01/2015 at 14:10 seamoss says:
Most likely a false positive.
28/01/2015 at 12:00 Humppakummitus says:
Oi! Stop resizing pixelart!
28/01/2015 at 12:07 GameCat says:
And saving it as JPG file. :x
28/01/2015 at 12:14 JB says:
Ook?
28/01/2015 at 14:21 floher says:
You got me at the Discworld reference.
28/01/2015 at 14:50 RichSG says:
Great little game considering the time it was made in.
Shame they didn’t take the question of ‘escaping the lab’ or ‘participating in a study by following the walkthrough further’ though. Unless I missed something, it ended kind of abruptly. Though still great fun to play!
28/01/2015 at 20:18 Jakkar says:
Inexplicably charming.
29/01/2015 at 03:09 UltimateWalrus says:
Thank you very much for featuring this! We’re really flattered you liked our game out of all the ones you played :]
Sorry to spam, but if you like this game, you might want to follow Ultimate Walrus through facebook, twitter, or the newsletter on my site (ultimatewalrus.com). In addition to getting news about other projects, you’ll know when we expand on Mango Blue in the future, which we were thinking of doing.
29/01/2015 at 08:10 jamesgecko says:
Does it just end when you get the fourth note? It seems like it might be a puzzle, but I have no idea what to do.
29/01/2015 at 11:38 RichSG says:
Is that the clipboard note? Or the G G R B one?
31/01/2015 at 21:45 UltimateWalrus says:
Try clicking on the octopi :] The clicking is a little finicky in the current version (sorry about that) so if it doesn’t do anything try again.