Seed of Life Review - Save a planet, a puzzle to faith

Stop me if you heard this one: a solitary, humble and reluctant hero starts in a slightly ambiguous quest before realizing that the fate of the world lies in the fulfillment of the task. Dangers will be confronted, skills will be acquired, allies will add their wisdom to the growing mastery of our hero. It may be literally the oldest premise of narration, but in one way or another, when it is well done and well used, Hero's Journey remains a magnificent structure. Not to bury lead, but it's the engine that feeds Seed of Life.

At a time action-adventure game and puzzle game, Seed of Life is an intriguing and sometimes frustrating mechanisms on an artistically realized dying planet called Lumia. You play a girl named Cora, who, thanks to a stumble on a note left by his grandfather, starts in a quest to first find his parent, then to save his who darkened. As beautiful and bucolic as Lumia can appear at first glance, it is hostile to almost every turn. The water bubbling an extraterrestrial magic poison, there are energy barriers that hinder progress and shortly after the start of its journey, Cora meets extraterrestrial forms of life that will kill it with a unfortunate shot.

Lumia is full of a large number of mechanical and environmental puzzles, and you will spend most of your time exploring and learning to survive the dangers of the hostile planet while you head to your goal to find the seed of life and to restore health in the world. But you also meet occasional allies, such as the Nar extraterrestrial, which helps both cora to go to its goal and gives it a series of instructions and tools to make its survival a little less doubtful. By collecting talismans, Cora acquires important skills as the ability to see paths and hidden objects, or the ability to manipulate gravity or pushing dangerous extraterrestrials. In addition to talismans, an organic substance called Lumium feeds a large number of CORA capabilities, so much of the time will be devoted to the collection of yellow and brilliant material. Do not call it Mana. It is not like that.

Seed of Life does a good job by introducing capacity and new "powers" in a pleasant and regular progression that never leaves you stuck too long. Despite new channels and areas open when Cora reaches a new capacity or solves a puzzle, the world and the game are relatively linear. The world of Seed of Life is only semi-open, and although you often have several goals, the path to the next major quest is generally not questioned, and you get a device that directs you very early in The general direction of your goal. That said, the level of tutorial of the game could do a much better work to lead the player throughout the unknown world and clarify some mechanisms. Why are you taping on the floor lamps? Oh, to get a steam success, it turns out that.

Although finding solutions to environmental enigmas or others rarely a problem, there are times when the mechanics of the game is less than polished and becomes frustrating in its implementation. For example, open a magic door requires a specific amount of Lumium. Pressing a button starts the regular light output, but a second pressure on a button is required to apply it to the door. Unfortunately, the game has difficulty recognizing where the character is in order to invite the second pressure to the button, which means that much of the luminum is wasted, which requires either several returns to the point of control (where Health levels and luminum recharge) and / or collect more luminum from reappearance supplies in the area. Neither are fun, stimulating or rewarding. The health of Cora does not decrease either, which limits for a long time its ability to explore very far from a checkpoint. Adding timers or additional limits In addition to the puzzle resolution seems to be an arbitrary way to increase the challenge.

There are two types of platform games: those who are designed for this, adapted and make it fun and painless; And those like Seed of Life, who have a floating, imprecise platform that invariably leads to death or failure due to poor implementation. If you are frustrated by the games that let the characters climb incoherently Certains obstacles, or jump to reach Certains Légords but not the others, then you could be removed by the exploration and mechanics of movement of Seed of Life. These are certainly the weakest elements of the game.

Seed of life excels in its construction of the world, creating a planet that obviously passes from a place of beauty austere to a place of darkness and danger, with effective lighting and textures inspired by the desert, mountains and forests. I guess it could be qualified as post-apocalyptic, but it is not a landscape of ruins and rubble, but rather a landscape of plants and colorful extraterrestrial creatures, sometimes deadly, which go from the imagination and the 'ethereal to a little silly. The mainly ambient music generally remains out of the gap, part of a global sound design that is lagging away graphics. Cora has the most lines while it tells his trip internally, but most come with a kind of perplexed anxiety that does not show a lot of scope.

The Hero's Journey does Yeoman's work as a structure for Seed of Life, and the game offers imaginative environments and stimulating puzzles at the service of a classic discovery tale. Where the action, the platform and a precise contribution are necessary, Seed of Life shows its mechanical limits and the wonder is sometimes replaced by frustration, but the fans of puzzle adventure games with a touch of science -Fiction could find something to appreciate about Seed of Life despite his problems.