[While the new Indie Royale game bundle that we co-created with Desura is running, we’ll be profiling each of the four games featured in it, giving our honest opinion on the pluses and minuses of each title.Today, we take a look at Fractal, Cipher Prime’s too-smart-for-its-own-good block puzzler. ]
Want something hardcore? Great. Put down that copy of Left 4 Dead you have there. Play Fractal. Cipher’s Prime’s lovely block puzzler is Bejeweled for Rubik’s’ Cube enthusiasts, a casual masocore game for intellectuals. Is this a good thing? That depends. How much do you enjoy beating your head against a wall? Fractal, in spite of how the randomly generated hexagons will make you curse, is a lot of good, clean fun. You just have to be prepared to be deeply, truly and irrevocably frustrated.
The basic premise behind Fractal is a simple one. Your goal here is to compose as many shapes of identical hue as you can in as few moves as possible. What makes it different from its predecessors is how you’re supposed to accomplish all of this. Instead of lines, you’ll be building hexagons. Instead of an orderly descent from the top of your screen, you will see hexagonal tiles blossoming at random across the game board. Instead of time, you have a certain amount of ‘pushes’ (you create ‘blooms’ by nudging shapes across the board) allocated.
It’s tougher than it sounds. Fractal is not the sort of game that holds your hand. After the introductory level, you’re pretty much on your own. There are no hints, no sly nudges in the right direction. There is no way to clear unfortunate gridlocks, no means to break free from an impossible conundrum. Unless you’re particularly talented at this sort of game, you will see more than your fair share of restarts. At times, it can feel as though Fractal is as much about luck as it is about strategy.
This can be both good and bad. On one hand, it keeps you on your toes. On the other, well, it can get annoying. Really annoying. Fractal is one of the few games out there that is unafraid to intimate that you may be, in fact, a lot less intelligent than you initially believed. But if you’re willing to deal with that, Fractal has a lot to offer. The pacing of the levels in the Campaign mode feels just right. The Arcade mode, freed from the push restriction, will easily devour hours of your time. I haven’t played the Puzzle mode yet but if the rest of the game is any indication of what things will be, it should be pretty good as well.
Last but not least, the music’s a joy. With every combo you weave, the soundtrack grows exultant. As you draw closer to the end of your quota of pushes, the score grows listless and dark. It’s not integral to the game. You could easily play Fractal without sound. Nonetheless, it definitely enriches the title.
So, yes. Fractal is awesome. Fractal will also hurt your brain. It might even make you feel rather stupid. If you’re inclined towards a cerebral exercise, you’ll probably enjoy the game. Otherwise, you may want to consider slyly delivering it onto the doorstep of that one friend of yours that is too smart for his own good.
Official website here, and you can buy it as part of Indie Royale’s ‘New Year Bundle’ for the next few days. We also did a profile/review of Super Crossfire too!
Puzzle mode is actually a very good introduction to the concept and the basic moves, so if anyone feels lost, I suggest going through a few levels there.
Additionally, if you enjoy the game’s music and the bonus soundtracks, Cipher Prime’s bandcamp page has two free albums, Pulse: It’s a Prime Christmas, and Pulse: Philly is Golden.
Plus the company’s two other games, Auditorium and Pulse are worth mentioning/checking out as well. I had a lot of fun with the browser version of Auditorium demo a few years ago.
PS: this recent spammer streak that only consists of nonsense without actual spam links is weird.
It reminds me a bit of board games like Abalone and Gipf, but not as easy for the mind to grasp. Maybe I’ll get better, but my main tactic is to make a wish and click at random.
I’m very interested in Fractal, but I don’t think the price point for the Indie Royale is worth it.
Honestly, I feel like most of the games from the Indie Royale are either rejects or leftovers from the Humble Bundle, with a few gems (like Eufloria, which I bought that bundle solely for). Fractal definitely seems like the gem in this Indie Royale.
I also don’t like the fact that they don’t provide the system requirements for the games.
Since the Indie Royale is a rip off of the Humble Bundle, they should follow the same price model. If they did that, I would purchase it in a heartbeat.
i would rather call it casual than hardcore, even you have to put some thinking into it.
@KKK: hidden gems is relevant to your understanding. games in these bundles is so varried for a reason and they are all fairly good i think, some less, some more.. also i like how less appriciated games gets into it. unlike humble bundle, i dont know every game in the pack and i havent played half of them.
you call it a rip-off and blame it for not being the same in one sentence.. how come?
@KamiKazeKenji, £2.72 is more than you’d want to pay for a game that you’re “very interested in”? I don’t support indie royale because it doesn’t support linux, but complaining that the minimum price is too high seems odd, it’s still considerably cheaper than buying fractal on its own direct from the devs.
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