Seaweed: Fathomable

Review Podgamer Recommended

Fathomable

by J Nash (November 23rd, 2010 at 9:32 am)

Game: Seaweed. Publisher: Red Watermelon. Author: Rahul Biswas. Free (with ads). Play the game.

One of the acest things about iThing players is that we’ll try anything. There’s a brave indie contingent on, say, the Xbox, but you can’t imagine the general Xbox ownership queuing in their thousands at midnight to shoot each other over mishandled copies of Squid Yes! Not So Octopus. The iThing, on the other hand, has no artifice: the charts are equally as likely to be topped by heavily promoted big name rubbish like Assassin’s Creed as out of nowhere surprise zeitgeist rubbish like Angry Birds. We are cosmopolitan idiots.

We’re also pretty and charming, unlike PC owners (fat), Xbox owners (drunk) and nobody could find any PS3 owners to determine what was wrong with them, and anyway Seaweed.

Seaweed is so simple that I’ve half a rubbed chin it’s based on a pencil and paper game played during pickpocketing breaks by consumptive urchins, and if it isn’t then it’s good enough to have been.

All you have to do is light up the map by placing fish. A fish lights all the squares in its row and column (up to the point seaweed absorbs the beam); you can’t put two fish on the same line (unless there’s seaweed in between); That is It. There’s no clock; there are limited fish but you can move them around as you like.

There are a thousand levels, split into sets of ten; you can freely skip around the current ten and the game auto-saves your position in the lot (ie, you can flick back to Pond 3.3 or whatever and that unfinished puzzle’s fish will still be where you left them).

Seaweed is what SCIENCE would classify as a “deceptive timesink, model 6.” It’s dismissively easy on any screen to have just one square unlit by more or less bunging the fish in at random, at which point you then tussle with the simple logic, long ago conquered by those fictional Oliver! extras, for roughly the life of your current layer of skin.

(The difficulty curve is, once again for an iThing puzzler, all over the shop; there are some levels you can complete straight off without thinking, none of which is at the start. It’s refreshing not to have 200 tutorial levels or something, but the author could at least have thrown in an ego-unbruising opening.)

An updateable quasi-error is that when you finish a puzzle it’s instantly replaced by the next blacked-out board. This jars. A couple of triumphant musical notes’ pause would be enough, particularly because you can trip over the answer without meaning to; my pointiest criticism is that a board too often devolves into pushing each fish slightly around in series trying to catch that final square, a bit like chasing a king about with a castle in chess.

I like Seaweed a lot and suspect it’ll remain on my iThing forever — not a daily played game, but one to pop open now and then and never to regret the time spent with it, and which’ll sit happily alongside something like Cyber Circuit because it doesn’t even occur to iThing players to care. Games is games is games. Except tower defence fans, of course, they’re tramps.