Puzzle Arcade Review (XBLA)

Wed, Dec 31, 2008

When asked what kind of games I enjoy, the first genre I always list is "puzzles." I don't know what it is about puzzles and puzzle games, but I simply can't get enough of them. Any game that has "puzzle" right there in its title immediately captures my attention, and from Bobbles to Quests, I have thoroughly enjoyed the many forms that puzzles can take. Thus, when Eidos released Puzzle Arcade via Xbox Live Arcade, it was inevitable that I'd want to give it a try.

Puzzle Arcade doesn't shatter any boundaries or concoct any unique brain-teasers -- it's a jigsaw puzzle game, based around the age-old pastime of reassembling an image by fitting together its many pieces. There's nothing wrong with the classics, so long as they're handled properly, and the jigsaw puzzle is an exercise so simple and recognizable that it'd be fairly hard to get it wrong. You can imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that Eidos had found a few ways to get it wrong.

Let me make something exceedingly clear: I love jigsaw puzzles. When I walk into a game store and there's a jigsaw puzzle-in-progress on display, I simply have to fit a few more pieces together. My PC has three separate jigsaw-creation programs which I regularly apply to my digital photos. Once, I had a small part in an independent film, playing a character who was assembling a jigsaw puzzle in the background of a scene; the director became quite irritated with me because I kept completing the puzzle in between shots. To sum up, I'm only too happy to spend time with a jigsaw puzzle under any circumstance -- so you've got to include some pretty significant flaws before I stop enjoying myself.

The design behind Puzzle Arcade is sound: More than thirty photos & artworks have been included, ranging from easy and distinct images to visually tricky ones, such as abstract drawings, repeating patterns in nature, and so forth. These images allow the player to create customized puzzle experiences, choosing both the number of pieces (from a dozen to over a thousand) and a difficulty level (on higher levels, the pieces will require rotation, and some will start "upside down" as if dumped out of a box). Pieces are picked up with an on-screen cursor, rotated with the triggers, and will permanently stick to their neighboring pieces when placed correctly. It's a no-brainer in terms of game design, and all of the vital elements are in place, setting the stage for what ought to be an ideal jigsaw experience.

The controls and interface, sadly, are poorly implemented, serving only to detract from the fun. No matter what mode of play or level of difficulty you have selected, the game is played by repeatedly dropping puzzle pieces next to their neighbors, so there really shouldn't be any problem in executing this basic command. However, somebody thought it would be a good idea to have the piece-placement window be excessively narrow, causing the pieces to refuse a connection unless they are placed with near pixel-perfect accuracy. Time and time again, the player will set two pieces together which he knows to be a correct match, only to have the game reply with an "incorrect" response until he nudges it two pixels over.

This may seem like a minor gripe, and perhaps overly picky on my part, but one must consider the other factors at work which turn this unforgiving interface into a serious annoyance. For starters, it must be emphasized just how narrow the placement criteria are: I'm not saying the pieces need to leap across the screen and fit together if they get anywhere near eachother, but when the pieces are properly aligned, and the player is repeatedly dropping one piece onto the other without success, something is clearly wrong. It's one thing when two pieces that clearly go together won't join, but in harder puzzles where several pieces look similar, it's enough to make one genuinely believe they've got the wrong match. This only leads to frustration as the player cycles through several other possible pieces, only to eventually find that he was right the first time, but one pixel too far away.

Furthermore, it might be acceptable to demand highly precise placement if the player were given highly precise controls to match, but this is not the case. Putting a piece in just the right spot is easy enough with a finely controlled mouse, but when you're nudging around a flighty thumbstick with accelerating movement, it produces vague and general movements which do not match up with the finicky criteria. It's as if the game was designed for a PC, and then ported over without being tested -- Puzzle Arcade needs to take the imprecise nature of the Xbox thumbsticks into consideration, and it does not. Again, this wouldn't be an issue if it just popped up once in a while, but when it happens for nearly every piece, it becomes a genuine problem.

Most of all, however, this becomes an issue when juxtaposed with Puzzle Arcade's scoring system. In an effort to serve the "Arcade" portion of its title, Puzzle Arcade awards a score to puzzle-solvers based on their performance, including bonuses for difficulty level, difficulty of the image, number of pieces, and so on. The base score, however, is earned for rapid piece placement: Each correctly placed piece is worth 5 points, and also adds a little boost to one's multiplier. In other words, if another piece is laid down quickly enough, it will be worth x2 for 10 points, and if one can keep the streak going, pieces can start scoring 15, 20, and up to 40 points. Take too long between pieces, though, and the multiplier quickly shrinks back down to nothing. Oh, and one other thing -- an incorrect placement immediately knocks the multiplier back to x1.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. Puzzle Arcade awards scores based completely on one's speed, yet punishes you for being hasty and trying to place your pieces without slowly and carefully arranging them just right. Don't let yourself be tempted by the game's online leaderboards -- playing Puzzle Arcade for high scores is an exercise in sheer frustration. Stick with playing for the fun of it, if you want to enjoy Puzzle Arcade at all.

There is some fun to be had with Puzzle Arcade, thankfully, if you know where to look (and are willing to tolerate the controls). As in real life, one feels genuinely triumphant after completing a puzzle with several hundred pieces, and Puzzle Arcade allows you to save your puzzles-in-progress so you needn't do it in one sitting. The game also includes several variations on the general jigsaw theme: Apart from the "classic" match-and-fit mode, one can solve a puzzle in "turbo" mode, which allows the player to sort his pieces (by edge/interior, piece color, image quadrant, etc) and locks pieces in place even without any neighboring pieces, placed over a ghost image of the final subject. Turbo mode plays much more like a hidden object game, letting the player hunt for his particular piece in a visually challenging backdrop.

Other unique additions include the "Dynamic Puzzle," in which the segmented image gradually changes as the puzzle is assembled -- a city skyline photo may turn from day to night, for example. Or, for puzzlers who want to settle in for the long haul, there is the "Fractal Puzzle," which divides the image into pieces, and then into pieces of those pieces. Players will have to reassemble minor fragments of the overall image, and then reassemble their own creations into the final piece, which works quite well with the high-resolution images provided with the game.

$puzzarc-fractal$ Don't bother with the "Puzzle Challenges," however, which seem designed to showcase how poor the controls are. Each Puzzle Challenge adds an extra twist to the traditional game -- start with some pieces missing, play a puzzle whose image is changing in odd ways, etc. Then, there are some selections like "Finish a puzzle while two AI players are randomly moving your pieces around," which is exactly as annoying as it sounds. The speed-based challenges, however, are simply cruel, highlighting just how ineffective and awkward the controls are. One such challenge asks that you complete a 16-piece puzzle in one minute. The image chosen is a very simple one, and the pieces aren't even rotated. In real life, one could probably put this puzzle together in roughly 20 seconds. Yet, thanks to the slow and inaccurate piece movement, and the extremely picky placement criteria, even managing a one minute limit is difficult. It's not a challenge because one is under duress or because of the visual difficulty, it's a challenge because the game makes it a chore to complete an extremely simple task.

In the end, that's really the backwards thing about Puzzle Arcade: The jigsaw puzzle is an extremely simple and easily approachable activity, yet this particular digital incarnation has made the process harder, not easier. The placement criteria that are ill-suited to the controller. Custom puzzles can be made via the Xbox LIVE Vision camera, but not from images stored on the hard drive or a digital camera that can leave your living room. A lack of any "arrange pieces" action, or any ability to select multiple pieces at once, means that pieces are frequently obscured by other pieces, or must be slowly and tediously retrieved from all corners of the play field (which gets quite large when working with hundreds of pieces). It's as if the creators of Puzzle Arcade were completely unaware of the thousands of jigsaw games that came before, and the helpful interface designs that came with them.

Still, with the promise of a new puzzle every week, plans for new DLC packs, and local/online multiplayer for that old-fashioned "solve a puzzle at the table with the whole family" feeling, there's still some puzzle pleasure in store for the patient player. Puzzle Arcade might not be the best jigsaw game ever crafted, but if you're looking for a digital puzzle experience -- and you don't have a PC, where there are dozens of free jigsaw games -- you might not hate it.