Here's a link to The Infinite Cat Project: The Infinite Cat Project
8.5 ultra recommended
Halloween is here, and if you're like me you face two tough choices: (1) Do I give out some of the Reece's Peanut Butter Cups to trick or treaters... or eat them all myself? And (2) what horror movie should I watch on October 31st? But if you've lost your job in these tough economic times, you probably have bigger worries.
Two such luckless and freshly unemployed individuals are Becky and Tim. Spooky Spirits, from Legendo Entertainment, is a game about matching colored blocks, catching spookies, and trying to get one's job back after a careless mistake sends one out on the streets. Becky and Tim are two childlike, ghostbusterlike wardens of the Spirit World, which is like a giant prison for spookies. When you watch an episode of Ghost Hunters and see footage of a dark shadow stepping out from a doorway and suddenly vanishing - that's a spookie. To keep these troublesome spirits from haunting innocent humans (and not-so-innocent humans of the variety that sell admission to fake haunted bed and breakfasts) all the spookies were rounded up and dropped into the Spirit World.
Then they escaped. Who is at fault for this prison break is a matter of some disagreement. Becky says Tim did it. Tim says Becky did it. I'm sure you know how that goes!
Spooky Spirits is a Tetris-like puzzle game; gameplay primarily involves dropping colored blocks into a container in the attempt to clear away groups of blocks before any reach the top. Run out of room to drop more blocks and it's "nice try" and back to the unemployment line. You must drop two blocks at a time, and there is no rotating them clockwise or counter-clockwise - they fall side by side, horizontally, and you'd probably have to hack and decompile the game code to change this behavior. You can choose which two blocks at the top of the container you'd like to drop by swapping around any of the six candidates with its neighbors on either side. But you only have about ten seconds to do so, or the two blocks currently selected will drop on their own. Just visible above the six candidate blocks are the bottom halves of six others next in sequence. After each drop, two blocks from this second row will lower into place to fill in the gap.
Longtime readers know that I despise colored blocks! So any game that gives me a chance to seek revenge on red, blue, green, yellow, purple, etc. blocks is a good game in my book.
Once in the container, any block touching a neighboring block of the same color will fuse with it. Besides this fusing property, most blocks are quite ordinary. (They have eyes, and they're a little spooky, however they're not actual spookies.) But every now and then a block has a real honest to goodness spookie trapped inside. You can see it banging around in there, trying to escape. One of these spookie blocks will destroy any clump of similarly colored blocks it touches, and is the only way to clear blocks from the container (and catch the spookie). The more blocks you remove at a time, the higher your score.
Valuable bonus points are given out for destroying more than one clump at a time ("double bonus") or setting up chain reactions ("chain bonus"). At higher levels, chain reactions are essential or the container will quickly overflow.
There are three game modes in Spooky Spirits, divided into five themed levels. "Panic mode" dares you to reach a certain score on each level. The higher the level, the higher the goal. All the captured spookies are dumped (in liquid form) into the Spookie-tank, and by glancing at the tank you can keep track of how many more you need to catch before the next level is unlocked. "Eternity mode" lets you play a single level as long as you like. The longer you last, the faster things get, until finally the blocks are pushing up from the bottom faster than you can use carefully-planned spookie drops to eliminate them. Cursed blocks! The goal is to see how high of a score you can obtain. And finally, my favorite mode is "Puzzle mode." The boards are prearranged with specific patterns of blocks and/or spookies, and you have a limited number of drops to elimiate all the colors on the board. (Gray blocks act as fillers and don't count.) This is a slow-paced, thinking player's challenge. You need to be able to foresee two and three (or more!) moves ahead and take chain reactions into account to be successful.
By the way, I was just kidding about trying to decide what movie to watch on Halloween night. Of course the best horror movie of all time, The Haunting, is the film to watch. (I'd also accept Halloween.)
No doubt about it, Spooky Spirits is one gorgeous game. A high level of polish and pizazz oozes from every nook and cranny. The 3D backgrounds are atmospheric and perfect, with rolling fog and special effects. The game display is widescreen and high resolution, with no loss of detail. Perhaps it's overkill for such a simple puzzle game, but you won't get tired of looking at it. For that reason alone Spooky Spirits gets an explosion score of 9.7! The music is equally impressive - each area has its own appropriate theme and each in turn is approriately Halloween-ish.
There's not a lot to dislike here. My only complaint is that when a tall stack of blocks is threatening the end of the game, and you successfully drop a spookie block into place and destroy that stack, you still sometimes lose the level. I'd prefer that any check for a stack pushing into the top row of droppable blocks be put on hold while blocks are being eliminated from the container.
There are no powerups or special blocks, which makes for a very uncomplicated and simple puzzle game... and it's up to you to decide if that's a pro or con.
I liked this game too. Saying the graphics are gorgeous is putting it lightly… one of the best looking games I’ve seen in a long time