Not everything good is for me. I famously dislike The Cure, for instance, despite their status as a critical and commercial success. In my everyday life, this isn’t an issue at all. When I dislike something, I stop consuming that thing. Pretty easy. Writing reviews is a different beast altogether where I have to press on and consume even when the consumption is unpleasant to me.
Paramount to understanding this is understanding the process by which entertainment journalists usually cover any genre of art – especially in the case of small sites like the one you are currently visiting. (Hi, by the way. I hope you’re having a lovely time.) I’ll even use 39 Days to Mars as an example since this article is supposedly a review of that game.
The process might be different for a site like IGN where developers are clamoring for their game to be covered, but for me, I have to keep my eye on any industry I want to cover and reach out to game developers, record labels, publishers, etc for a review copy of whatever art I want to cover. In this case, I shot an email to It’s Anecdotal (the developer of this game) asking for a review copy and telling them a little bit about this site. The moment I did this, I was on the hook to write about their game or run the risk of burning bridges within that company and maybe within the industry. Not covering the game once they provided a download code would have been tantamount to stealing.
A site like IGN probably has games specifically sent to them without ever asking for them, and they can play those games for a little while and decide to cover them or not cover them based on how they feel. I sometimes get unsolicited emails with download codes for new albums, and I never feel the need to respond to those emails or listen to the albums or cover the band specifically because they reached out to me and not the other way around. But I asked for the code, so I knew what was at stake.
What I have here is a good game that isn’t for me and that I would have quit playing if I wasn’t on the hook to cover it. It’s well made. The art style is simple on purpose but still oozes with character and charm. Many of the puzzles are well thought out and fun, but that’s also where we get to the crux of my dissatisfaction with this game. I thought I was covering a cooperative puzzle game but it’s really a cooperative game that happens to have puzzles in it.
The concept of the game is that two best buds are flying a sort of airship to Mars. One player controls one bud and the other player controls the other bud. They overcome various challenges together to get there, which includes tasks as mundane as making tea to more complicated issues that would conceivably arise when trying to fly a damn balloon-powered ship to Mars.
It’s a cool idea for a game, and when the game trends towards figuring out actual puzzles, I enjoyed it a lot. My personal issue with the game is that too often, it trended towards two people just doing stuff together that would be easier to do by ourselves. A good example of this is when we had to put together a snack for ourselves following what I will loosely call “a recipe”, which involved dumping a bunch of ingredients on bread.
This task almost broke me and brings to light the one actual complaint I have of the game that will affect anyone who plays it whether or not they are into this specific kind of game or not. The controls suck. They are much too floaty for a game that relies on two people working together, and it often felt as if the true enemy wasn’t the task at hand but how frustrating it was to make the game do simple tasks my wife and I were trying to coordinate with each other. Now, those controls were far from game breaking but combined with the fact that I didn’t really enjoy the tasks themselves, wellllll, it didn’t help.
So what I say next should not come off as an indictment of the game but more as a warning for anyone interested in playing a co-op puzzle game. I was looking for an experience more akin to Portal 2’s cooperative mode where the puzzles quite literally could not be conquered with a single player alone. And this game had some of that, which constituted some of my favorite moments. Any time we were thinking together and working on separate but simultaneously important tasks, we had a blast. If the game was all that, I would recommend this to puzzle fans looking for some co-op play.
Of course, as I’ve been saying, the game isn’t that, and it may not be for people seeking the same thing I sought. I normally wouldn’t spend so much time explaining this except for that other sites and people will be slightly misleading in this regard, and I’d rather the people expecting one niche genre don’t become disappointed when they discover it’s another kind of niche genre.
However, anyone who likes the idea of the cooperative puzzle version of a three-legged race, boy do I have a game for you, and it’s a pretty good game. A lot of people will find plenty of fun to be had in struggling to synchronize tasks together that would be easy as a single person but more difficult with two people. For a person who isn’t me, this kind of challenge could be hilarious fun, and the variety of these tasks are akin to a single-celled organism evolving into thousands of lifeforms over the course of billions of years – a simple idea that spreads into many unique directions.
As anyone reading this could probably guess, I didn’t end up finishing the game. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and I wouldn’t force my extremely pregnant wife to go through that either. But I did play far beyond the point I would have if I merely spent money on this game. I played it to the point where I could feel confident about whether or not I would recommend it to anyone.
And if this article has come off as overtly negative, that’s specifically because I played this game well past the point when I wanted to quit. In a strange way, my attempt to be fair to this game and to honor the implied agreement between journalist and developer has lead me to be less fair to the game than it deserves.
It comes down to this: do you want a mental cooperative challenge or a physical one? Rarely will you find yourself challenged mentally (although, when it happens, it’s special), but you’ll often find challenges that are physically difficult to do. If that’s fun to you, you’ll love this game. If that’s a version of hell to you, you won’t. If you’re somewhere in the middle on those things, the execution here is good enough that it’s worth buying.
It’s Anecdotal provided the review copy of this article. You can purchase the game in the Nintendo eShop.