Negative Gamer Review: Golden Tangram (Xbox Indie Games)

Puzzles aren’t usually my thing. My left-brain is starting to wilt and die due to the lack of interaction it gets from my conscious mind. It doesn’t help that my severe lack of patience coupled with my worryingly short attention span mean I’m not– Oh hey! something shiny!

Anyway, Indie games need playing and a code was kindly provided by developer Spyn Doctor for their puzzle solving game Golden Tangram going for the low low price of 80 Microsoft fun bucks. A tangram is a puzzle involving seven shapes (or ‘tans’) which must moved into certain types of configurations to be solved. This game brings all the fist-bitingly extreme fun of moving wooden pieces to form a shape matching that of a given silhouette into the adrenaline-pumping digital age.

The make-or-break feature of this game is its presentation, and whether the xbox controller can manage well enough to replace your dexterous human fingers. It already has the market sewn-up so far as tangram videogames go.

If the tan fits, wear it. Or something.

The goal of the game is to recreate the shape shown in a small silhouette at the top of the screen. The player does this by maneuvering them into place from the sides of the screen. However, I found myself getting annoyed and quitting out of more than one of the puzzles simply because it would not ‘recognise’ that the shape was finished. And no, I am not stupid. It was definitely correct. When a shape approaches completion a bar appears to show you you’re close. But in these cases it would never fully complete. Jiggling some of the pieces around to get a better fit worked some of the time, but not all of it. In a game where making the shown shape is the only target, it is vitally important to the player to be able to, y’know, actually do it.

This issue would be slightly less grating if the player had some sort of ‘undo last action’ button, or even an option to reset the entire puzzle altogether. You can’t place pieces to overlap and you can’t go out of the boundaries of the screen. So, when I had made a mess of a puzzle I couldn’t simply dismantle what I had done to start over with ease. I had to quit out of the puzzle (which prompt an option to save progress, which seems pointless to me) and re-select it as it was quicker than trying to make room for a second go by hand.

Quitting out of puzzles doesn’t have any negative repercussions for the player whatsoever. There are 250 puzzle patterns of three different puzzle types all available from the outset of the game. There is some difficulty curve present, but it’s not obvious. The puzzles further up the list tend to be harder. But, the nature of this game means that some solutions can be spotted instantly by some, yet take forever for others to see. Some sort of unlocking system wouldn’t have gone amiss. Then again, this isn’t exactly the type of game you play for a ruddy good challenge.

‘Custom Soundtracks’ is shorthand for ‘silence’.

When you start the game you are treated to a charming acoustic looped tune played over the simplistic menu. But in-game all you have to pleasure you aurally is the clicking sound of rotating pieces and the occasional sparkly jingle that indicates a puzzle has been solved. Plugging in my iPod and listening to Tenacious D albums just seemed a little jarring to me. I’m tip-toeing around the word ‘boring’, but I struggle to think of another way of putting my thoughts when it comes to the way this game presents itself. It does what it does well. But it doesn’t show us anything new or interesting. It’s tangrams, on your Xbox. That’s it really. At o.31 space dollars per puzzle, you don’t really expect much more.

Some other points worth mentioning:

• The game provides a ‘Freestyle Game’ mode in which you can create and save your own puzzles. To me, this redefines ‘pointless’.
• Some indicator of scale on the silhouettes would be nice. Often I found myself struggling as I hadn’t realised certain shapes were supposed to be larger than they appeared.
• I experienced a minor glitch at least twice while playing, where the silhouette that normally appears in the top left of the screen was right in the middle. But far be it from me to nit-pick over such trivial things.

All in all, Golden Tangram is not a bad game. That said however, it’s barely a game. You can cut out a piece of paper and have the same experience live, in 3D with tactile response. There’s nothing wrong with it and it does exactly what it says on the tin. There are tangrams, they are gold. So far as I know there are no other shape puzzle solving indie games on XBL at the moment.

You should play this game if…

…You have 80 spare MSpoints to waste, no friends, and a lot of time to kill (and also don’t mind being made to feel unintelligent by shapes on a screen.)

Final Score

A bare bones simple puzzle game. If you go in expecting any more than tangrams you will be sorely disappointed.