QCF: Hairy Tales

There's often a fine line between what makes a good and bad puzzle game. While some puzzles can be deceptively hard and rewarding, others for can just be frustrating for some reason. And when a game is made of nothing but these challenges you'd better be sure that they're fun and well designed, because without anything else a pure puzzle experience just doesn't have a lot to fall back on.

Hairy Tales is very much one of these pure experiences. It's a cheap little game that's all about its main mechanic and little else. And while that can be commendable for a pure gameplay centric title, sometimes it just doesn't work.

The main gameplay of Hairy Tales consists of creating a path for your troll character to run along towards the exit. Being the moronic creature that he is, he'll just run forward without hesitation; meaning it's your job to make sure nothing stands between him and the goal. You do this by selecting tiles and rotating gates for him to bounce off of and change direction. This is basically the bulk of the main game: determine which tiles go where, and set the little fellow off on his journey to the exit hoping he doesn't fall to his doom in the process. As you can tell, this is a very simple gameplay mechanic which does get old very fast. While the game does its best to mix things up with enemies, directional tiles and boss fights, every stage feels a lot like the same thing. And for a game that's all about the puzzles, the challenges created by them aren't that interesting; it just isn't enough.

Most of this is due to the design of the puzzles themselves. Some were annoyingly easy and dull, while others left me stumped but still ultimately bored. There were also complex looking puzzles I managed to surpass in ways the designers probably didn't intend. I'd regularly beat a level and end up pondering the tiles that I didn't use, and I couldn't help thinking that I somehow cheated the game's intention behind that challenge. Either way, when I did beat a particularly tricky puzzle I often didn't feel any accomplishment at all. You can skip stages to progress if you get stuck, but I think it says something for 

the game when I didn't really feel bad about doing it. The puzzles in Hairy Tales are just too wishy-washey to be effective. Even the harder puzzles never really challenged me in a way that actually mattered. And with these stages being the bulk of the game, that's really unfortunate.

For some reason this game has a life system, which is outright baffling. Walk off into the abyss or die three times and the stage resets, changing all previously set tiles to their beginning positions; this actually threw me off and stopped my train of thought dead. While it might seem odd to be attacking such a small aspect of the game specifically this deserves the attention because it was the only part of the game that was outright bad, rather than mediocre like the rest of it. It interrupts any flow that the game has going for it, and really doesn't make sense for a puzzle game like this.

The wrapping of the game and its presentation, however, is fairly nice. The fantasy creatures and quirky character designs are nice to look at and it's charming to see your character running, arms stretched out like an airplane, towards the end of a level. It adds a nice layer of humor which is very much appreciated and sprinkles a little bit of fun and atmosphere around an otherwise dry game. It's definitely pleasant to look at, although it gets boring when you stay so long in each of the three worlds. Environments blend in with everything else at that point and it's really hard to stay interested in the game when you've been looking the same scenery for a fair amount of time.

It's hard to write a lot about Hairy Tales because there isn't really much to say about it; it's just kind of boring. While the character designs can be fun, the base gameplay often just conveys a sense of boredom and repetition. The attempts to mix up the gameplay don't really matter either since there were just similar variations of the exact same thing. As an iPhone app it might be fun between bowel movements, but as a desktop experience it really doesn't feel that entertaining or inventive in the slightest.