Martin Van Buren, Monster Slayer - Gomie v. 2015

[Gizmog]

Ahh, Martin Van Buren, Monster Slayer. Probably the best-named game of the year. Mogri presents us with a historical yarn about one of our silliest named presidents and his campaign against the undead. It's a game in the same genre as Sprout was, the key-item finding concept but Moogle takes it in a different direction and it's interesting to compare the two.

In Sprout, you merely had to have the correct item and the puzzle solved itself as soon as you tried to interact. Martin Van Buren puts the puzzles into a battle format: Have the right item or die trying. It adds a bit more of a time tax, because failure has consequences and risks tedium. The tedium is alleviated by being able to save anywhere, which keeps you from having to "re-solve" puzzles. Once you've figured it out, you're safe, you're done and that's a good thing.

Further, by adding this element of failure you gain the element of success: Solving the puzzle means YOU found the right thing and made the right choice at the right time. Take a bow, Einstein. The player instantly feels better about his role in the game.

The only downside to the Van Buren approach is that you know that each battle is a puzzle and thus become aware you need to find a solution. Sprout had everything on one kind of screen, so you could never be sure if you were looking at puzzle, solution, or a little bit of both. With an exception or two, Van Buren has solutions on the map and puzzles in the battle. There's also not as much atmosphere to Van Buren as there was to Sprout, and the "President fights monsters" idea could've been a little wackier or a little deadpan. It's in an emotional middle ground.

The maps lack a lot of flavor, but that blandness makes it easy to tell what you can interact with and what you can't. The monsters are kinda cute, Van Buren himself is a really nice design. It's hard to judge the puzzles having already played the game before, but my first impression was that the difficulty was right on the money. You're not gonna lose any sleep over this game, but it feels good to have the right answer.

It's a good enough game that I don't want to spoil it, so go ahead and give it a shot. The OHR Format is kind of a bummer, the default OHR Music is the lamest part of the game and the download and extraction and running process takes a good chunk of time. There's all kinds of flash games like this and there's a reason this genre has an audience: It's fun! Would this game be better off in Flash, or at least a browser? Maybe. I think it took me about 20 minutes the first time and that's long enough to be worth the whole process.