Every so often, a gamer can find themselves in the mood for a particular flavor of game, and these effects can be especially pronounced when one finds oneself surrounded by entries of that genre. Between Braid, the announcement of Henry Hatsworth, and next month’s scheduled release of The Fool and His Money, it’s an understatement to say I’ve had an increased enthusiasm for puzzle games lately. Thus, when the opportunity came to review The Magic Toy Chest by Graduate Games, a “physics-based puzzler featuring addictive and open gameplay” inspired by classic titles like The Incredible Machine, I jumped at the chance. Yes, the child-oriented theme is a little outside of my demographic segment, but a good puzzle transcends markets, and you’re never too old to screw around with an open-ended physics game. On the other hand, open-ended physics games are pretty easy to find for free these days, and The Magic Toy Chest sells for $19.95. So, just how magical a chest are we talking about, here?
The Magic Toy Chest, as a child-friendly game, naturally boasts that it is “for the whole family.” This much, at least, is quite true; the game is accessible, intuitive, and unimposing, presenting a colorful world full of amusing toys and an extremely basic premise and goal. Further, it can be played on most any Windows PC — its system requirements are so basic as to fit any family computer from the last decade or so (Pentium 300MHz or better). Parents needn’t worry about their kids running this game, nor playing it — nothing even remotely objectionable can be found in The Magic Toy Chest, whose sole plot point is “The house is a mess. Clean it up.”
Cleaning house, in The Magic Toy Chest, takes the form of 80 or so individual puzzles, in which the player is presented with a 2D arrangement of toys and platforms, and tasked with moving one particular type of toy to the titular storage apparatus. Doing so requires proper placement and use of the various toys; baseballs will roll down inclines, dart guns will knock other toys about, and toy rockets will propel themselves (and anything in their path) across the screen rapidly. If you’ve played The Incredible Machine (and if you haven’t, you ought to), you already know how to play The Magic Toy Chest. Admittedly, this game isn’t going to win many points for originality, not when following in the footsteps of so many other Rube Goldberg games. The new ingredients it does add to the formula, though, are all clever enough to interest experienced puzzle gamers.
Where The Magic Toy Chest primarily differs from The Incredible Machine is in its fully real-time gameplay. In The Incredible Machine, solving the puzzles was about setting up every last element just right, hitting “start,” and standing back to watch the results. The Magic Toy Chest, on the other hand, is interactive from the get-go, meaning you can’t place gravity-affected objects in midair and then prepare something for them to land on; everything needs to be placed and used in proper sequence. This adds an additional layer of thinking and planning to the solutions, and occasionally, a few objectives based on timing and reflex. This also means that certain puzzles can be solved by hammering away at them with repeated actions; shoving a ball across a platform can be accomplished by dropping a block on one side of it, picking it up, and dropping it again, until you’ve nudged it to its intended position. However, the game rates every solution on time and efficiency, allowing you only so many actions in order to receive gold stars for the level.
The difficulty and progression of The Magic Toy Chest works exactly as you’d expect for an object-based puzzle game: The game introduces a new toy, pits you against half a dozen puzzles centered around its use, and then repeats the process, adding in new gameplay elements one by one until you’re working with all 16 toys. A few noteworthy additions include little flipping toy dogs, gravity-altering robots, and water balloons that can be flung from the player’s POV at the toys, sending everything flying away from the point of impact. Combine these elements for 80-odd puzzles, and throw in a nice, competent level editor for added replay value, and you’re looking at 4-6 hours of good, clean, reasonably challenging fun — not including any levels you might design yourself.
As such, I was nearly prepared to give The Magic Toy Chest an emphatic thumbs-up, but there are a few elements of sloppiness and poor programming where the game comes up short. As often as a puzzle requires a clever solution, there are more than a few occasions where you’ll find yourself at the mercy of a slightly flighty physics engine; a block that tumbled into the toy chest once will take a bad bounce on another playthrough and get stuck, requiring a level restart. Sometimes, in fact, a simple stack of square blocks will remain perfectly still, while other times it will shift inexplicably to one side, the blocks somehow being squeezed to one side by the ones above them. Further, while any puzzle can be retried simply by pressing “R,” this drops you back to the level intro screen, and makes you wait while it reloads the entire set-up. It only takes 5 seconds or so, but when you find yourself up against a puzzle that you need to try dozens of times to get through, it can get annoying. Also, I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong with the in-game timer:
Mind you, I’d been playing for maybe 90 minutes at that point.
The Magic Toy Chest is a fun game, it’s true. It’s quick to learn and has a good amount of variety to its puzzles, and its cheerful motif will put a little smile on your face. Parents looking to amuse their young gamer progeny would do well to consider this title. For the adult gamer, however, $20 is asking a bit much unless you have faith that there’ll be some compelling user-submitted levels later on. It’s a decent re-tread of The Incredible Machine, but it’s a re-tread nonetheless, and while it brings a few new toys to the table, most of them are a little dusty by now.
On the other hand, Graduate Games does offer an unconditional 60-day money-back guarantee. So you might just want to give The Magic Toy Chest a whirl, if you’ve got a penchant for puzzles. The Magic Toy Chest is available now for Windows PC here.
August 13th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Jesse-
I thought your review was very positive and your few critiques very fair. We hope people continue to make great new puzzles too! and don’t worry we’re looking into the game timer…(it’s aggregate across profiles so it can be tricky…could you send me your data.ini file to help?) Cheers!
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
the new version 1.01 fixes the ingame timer issue