Eurogamer has gotten the attention of a select few in the blogosphere for its review of indie darling and IGF Seamus Mcnally winner Crayon Physics Deluxe. It correctly identifies a quirk with the game's difficulty curve:
CPD presents something of a problem. It can be a fantastically fun and challenging game, but often only if you choose to ignore the obvious route to the finish. One level on the penultimate island clearly wants you to create a weight and pulley system around a floating cloud, but it's impossible not to notice you can literally draw one straight line and complete the level. Years of gaming conditioning tell you to do just that, and expecting players to take the scenic route to a star is a problem in the level design. Success is ludicrously rewarding if you steel yourself to do something a particular way, but you'll know you could always have used the old box, rope and weight trick in a fraction of the time.
The reviewer is correct. Years of gaming conditioning do force you towards taking the shortcut because the game doesn't tell you you can't. We have become so coddled by expansive achievement-ridden games that practically include a "to enjoy follow these directions" manual built in to a tee that the concept of having seemingly unauthorized fun with a game seems blasphemous. They didn't reward me for avoiding the obvious solution, so how can I have fun with the game? Would this reviewer have given the game a higher score if there was an explicit achievement for clearing a puzzle using only rhombi, or illustrations of Hobbes? The implication that Crayon Physics would be more fun if the creative solutions were somehow authorized or rewarded by the designer is laughable.
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