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Word Trails (iOS): COMPLETED!

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As I have a Netflix subscription, I get access to a number of games on iOS as a bonus. Most of them are shovelware nonsense. Some are tie-ins with Netflix shows like Squid Game or Queen’s Gambit. Some, are “indie hits” like Kentucky Route Zero. Some fit into more than one of these categories.

Word Trails is probably shovelware. It’s one of $hlmun games which litter the App Store that are effectively identical, and when you see the screenshots you’ll realise you’ve seen a hundred variants of it already, often as an advert in some other shovelware game. So I played it almost daily for two whole years and finally completed it. All 6070 levels.

Some people have asked me, “deKay. You’re a man with an extensive knowledge of games and you know what is good and what is bad in the gaming sphere. You have played many strange and unusual games, often eschewing the popular and mainstream for the niche and unusual. With that in mind, why the hell are you playing some ostensibly IAP-based, albeit with the IAPs removed for Netflix, tosh like this when you yourself frequently say telephone games are not games and don’t deserve your time or eyeballs?”. And to those people I say “Because it’s there”.

Now, readers of my diary will remember when I played many hundreds of levels of a dreadful iOS based, Doctor Who themed hidden object game which falls into a similar category as this and you may wonder why I’d put myself through something like that again. Word Trails at least requires a little bit of intelligence to play, even if it’s just as dull, but it’s just a Boring Boggle Clone.

The idea is to make words using the letters in the “wheel” at the bottom of the screen. Find all the words to fit in the puzzle, and you move on to the next level. That’s it – the whole game. 6070 times. You can, if you like, do a bonus puzzle each day where you do the same thing but have to try and do the words in a specific order. Manage that, and you get points which eventually unlock pictures of and related text about animals or mountains or something. Worst way to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica ever. Sometimes, in the main puzzles, you unlock gold squares or jigsaw pieces which eventually complete some other puzzle or list of items at, say, a beach, but there’s literally no reason to do this. You get some (in-game) currency, which is totally unnecessary because they’ve ripped all the IAPs out.

Quickly, I found that although the “longest word” was rarely the same (although sometimes I did get the same two or three puzzles repeated in a row), the same combinations of letters came up very frequently. For example, if AEMT are in the list, I could immediately tick off MATE, TEAM, TAME, MEAT. When you’ve done this 3035 times out of 6070, the already very samey game becomes even more samey. The game will add “allowed” words that aren’t on the board to a bonus pot for more currency when it fills up.

To make things wonderfully inconsistent and stupid, sometimes there’s a word you’ve never heard of which turns out to be an archaic legal term. Sometimes you can use both the UK and US spellings of words (like COLOR and COLOUR), sometimes you can’t (like it allows MOULD but not MOLD). Sometimes it seems to allow a word but then in a different puzzle it won’t. And, for some reason, it won’t ever allow the word ROTA, but will allow ROTAS. Actually, plurals themselves are irritatingly facile and when I found the long seven letter word is just one of the six letter words with an S on the end a little piece of me died each time.

Oh, and some rude words it allows, but only as bonus words, not as words on the actual puzzle. Some, it won’t allow at all. There also seem to be an unexpected number of religious words – mainly Christian, relating to church objects or processes – that are allowed, but although BIBLE is possible, neither KORAN or QURAN is allowed. Hmm.

So, should you play this game? Absolutely not. But, it did kill some time for a few minutes in my day. For TWO YEARS.

Kimono Cats (iPhone): COMPLETED!

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Kimono Cats is a very bad game.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Oh, you want a reason? Tch. Don’t you trust me? Ridiculous. Fine. Reasoning:

You know those terrible mobile telephone games where you can only progress if you grind the same repetitive tasks over and over again, for no real reward, unless you pay for in-game currency with real-world money? Well, this is one of those games, only without any of the real-world money purchases, because it’s on Apple Arcade. It still has the grind though. And the repetitive tasks. But cats, so it’s great, right? No.

My first issue is with the name of the game. It’s called Kimono Cats because there are two cats on a date at a natsu-matsuri festival wearing kimono because NO WAIT! You wear yukata to a natsu-matsuri festival. Already I’m annoyed.

Then there’s the date itself. You see, you’re the boy cat and you’re trying to impress the girl cat by walking seventy squillion billion miles along the world’s longest row of festival stalls, cramming food in her face and playing stupid games, hoping for a kiss and a cuddle as you build up a Heart Meter and a Money Meter. Let’s just skip over the fact you’re buying affection here and so either your boy cat is is predatory or your girl cat is toxic, and go straight to the WHY THE HELL IS IT SO LONG. There are 15 levels of walking and each takes longer than the last to fill the money meter up with something like 20-odd hours required in total.

And finally (of the things I’m going to mention because I’ve already written too much), it’s so. Damn. Boring. You throw darts up at moving balloons, each one containing something to entertain, feed, or disrespect your girl cat with. You have a limited number of darts, but you can get more by tediously metal detecting or playing daily to get bonus ones, or by visiting the sticker-book-like villages of other players to hopefully get them to send you more darts. You have your own village which you fill with buildings and objects you unlock from the games, shop and other tasks, but the main purpose of the games is to fill the meters. Burst the right balloon and you can play a game where you “throw” balls at a target. Or try to “catch” some goldfish. Or stab apples. Or other things which are no fun to play even once, let along the hundred and hundreds of times you have to in order to progress.

For once, I think I’d have preferred a version of the game WITH in-app purchases. Or, you know, I should have stopped playing?

Squiggle Drop (iPad): COMPLETED!

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Squiggle Drop is a simple idea but done in such a way to make you feel monumentally stupid.

The idea is that you draw a shape, which then (usually) drops down onto some objects and, hopefully, completes a task. So you might have a button that needs pressing, so you draw a brick and drop it on. Or there’s a chasm for a car to cross, so you draw a bridge. Things are somewhat more complicated when you need to draw shapes that move in a certain way once they land, or that perform two or more separate actions in order – but you can only draw one, unbroken, squiggly line.

Some real headscratchers were the one where you had to knock a cow out of a UFO tractor beam, only the cow is under the UFO, the object you draw is above it, and the UFO can’t be moved. Also, one where you have to pull a nail from a board but nail is vertically upright and the shape is, again, above.

It was enjoyable, but drawing with a finger wasn’t precise enough for some of the levels and so drawing seemingly the exact same shape on consecutive attempts caused wildly different outcomes due to the very tiny variations. Even with the hints (which show you the sort of shape you should draw) on, it’s near impossible to be exact, and so a few levels were unnecessarily frustrating. Still, physics games tend to be a bit random, and it wasn’t enough to prevent me from completing it. Well, complete until they decide to add some more levels, anyway.

Zookeeper World (iPad): COMPLETED!

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The original Zookeeper was the subject of one of my very first posts on this here gaming diary over 16 years ago. Well, not quite the original game as that was a Japan-only GBA release called Zooo or something, but the DS version I played was pretty much the same game. Anyway, forward time on a bit and the world of match-3 puzzlers has changed a bit so you can’t just re-release Zookeeper and expect it to fit in.

So they’ve aped the likes of Simon’s Cat and Puppy Blast and added loads of gimmicks to the formula. Now instead of (or as well as) removing a number of each animal, you also have to deal with revealing panels behind them to remove, or have them in bottles that you have to match two or three times before they disappear. Or there are flowers you can’t directly match to remove, crates you have to break, or beehives where removing animals next to them releases bees. There are fruit bombs that blow animals away, conveyor belts that move things round, and crowns you can only get rid of by dropping them off the bottom of the screen, as well as power-ups to employ.

On top of that, progress through the levels unlocks money and items for your real actual zoo which you can fill, Theme Park style, with attractions and animal displays. This is not the same Zookeeper I remember.

But, it is at least as addictive and it’s a lot of fun. Some of the levels are incredibly tricky, and a few may only be clearable with luck, but I loved working through all 200 of them and it’s one of the more polished and solid games of its genre around. Plus, as it’s Apple Arcade, there’s no in-app purchases like all the other games have, and no adverts.

The Room Two (iPad): COMPLETED!

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I quite enjoyed the first game when I picked it up on the Switch cheap a while back, but never saw this sequel (or rather, second half of the story) appear on there. I noticed it was on Apple Arcade and so thought I’d play it there instead what with it being essentially free.

Controlling it on a touch screen was actually more complex than perhaps it should have been, especially the zooming in and out which felt in inverse of pinch-to-zoom controls every other app ever has. Very little of the game is actually speed dependant though, so it wasn’t really a problem – I just preferred the joycon pointer waggle controls on the Switch.

The story continues on exactly from the end of the previous game, so it seems like one game cleaved in two rather than a separate instalment. It’s also more of the same thing – escape room style puzzles, with lots of key-finding and hidden drawers and arranging thing in a particular way. It did seem a bit easier than the first part, but a few parts of that were a little obtuse so maybe that’s intentional.