Indie Game of the Week 475: Harmony's Odyssey
by mento
Some weeks you just want to take things easy, relax in the summer heat, and hope your cat doesn't run off with your magic wand and cause reality to fall apart at the seams. Because that sounds like way too much to deal with and it's like 90 degrees outside.
The world is on fire, I'm still only partway through the last IGotW entry, and I've almost no time left over after penning the first episode of the (triumphantly?) returning Game OVA feature so today we're looking at a casual game intended for children that can be completed in a couple of hours. That's the level of focused energy I'm bringing to the feature this week, but regardless of any summer-induced lethargy Harmony's Odyssey presents the kind of easygoing tonic that I like to sprinkle into this series from time to time to break up all the dense RPGs and punishing Soulsploraction games (he's inventing new genres again, someone get the spray bottle). It features the young witch Harmony as she becomes involved in a bunch of world-morphing mishaps after her mischievous cat familiar gets loose with one of her wands, sending the duo across the city and various other global destinations in a fantasy world vaguely reminiscent of our own. The game is otherwise dialogue-free: often a means of skipping out on having to do too much localization—the developers are a Polish team—but also works out for younger children who perhaps are at a developmental stage where they can't (nor want to) deal with too much reading.
A finished diorama. Forming the mermaid pool from its four pieces was easy enough given how it's structured, but figuring out that it sits smack dab in the middle of this milieu took a bit more trial and error.
The way the topsy-turvy nature of the wayward magic is presented in gameplay form here is via a series of image puzzles that typically use the format of switching around the positions of pieces across a board until everything is put back in its proper place. The game uses a 3D version of this idea too, so sometimes it's as easy as figuring out where two halves of the same model connect and maybe feeling your way out from there. Alternatively, you can go with border fences or patterns on the ground to figure out what piece connects to which, and once you have these little groupings going it becomes that much easier to figure out where they fit into the larger image. The game breaks up these puzzles with other types from time to time, including a diorama-style spot the difference (similar to Tiny Lands, a game I reviewed here) and puzzles distinct to the current region. For each, as well as new developments, the game will give you little pop-up instructions on how they work to ensure you're never too lost. I particularly liked the option to group pieces of a puzzle together and then move them as a combined unit: it made it much easier to get them to the right spot without having to do so one by one.
The aesthetic is a very stylized fairytale book that slightly but not too much obfuscates the visual information you need to figure out what the finished image should look like. There's cute details like how putting two pieces together might cause a little animation to happen—the minotaurs and the centaurs are having a football match, and if you place the right one of each next to each other they'll start grappling each other—and the music is playful but non-intrusive, which is probably what you want from a game where thinking a lot is a requisite. As with fellow "finding the right places for things" puzzle game A Little to the Left the moral of the game seems to be "cats are shitty but we love them anyway", which would probably resonate well enough with anyone who has to cohabit with one of those furry little narcissists.
One of the "Spot the Difference" variants. You can spin the puzzle around to some extent, which makes it easier (or at all possible) to find some of the non-matches, and both halves of the screen will twist and turn in an identical fashion.
Then you get to the huge difficulty spike towards the end of the game that comes out of nowhere, involving some extremely time-sensitive stealth maze sections, and suddenly the charming visual ambiguity becomes anything but as you get clobbered by spikes you can barely make out from the rest of the messy level details as you're replaying these levels over and over trying to get the speedrunner-level of precision they demand. It's kinda bizarre for the game to go from 0 to 100 this fast, especially given its intended casual audience, and I can only imagine someone forgot to carry the one somewhere or else believed that forcing kids to abandon games after they become absurdly difficult towards the end "builds character" (felt like there was a lot of that around the NES era also, cool it managed to persist to the present day). I struggled my way through it, eventually, but I can't help but imagine how many Gen Alphas had their "NES TMNT underwater level" moment with this final stretch of ballbreakers.
On the whole, the game's got some neat ideas and a cute aesthetic but some bizarre missteps prevent it from reaching anything higher than mediocre: another one of these puzzle mixes to throw on the pile. That is often the curse with trying to experiment and be versatile: whenever you land on a great idea, you end up smothering it with other ideas that didn't pan out quite so well, leaving audiences wanting more of just what worked as they grit their teeth and rough out the lesser parts. That said, there's no point throwing out the baby with the bathwater; the core shifting-pieces puzzle experience is still a pretty cool idea that's executed well and it's hard to dislike a game this overtly joyful in its presentation but I'm not going to say it's worth choosing over the vast number of exceptional Indie puzzle games out there, for kids and adults both.
After the story campaign is over, there's still plenty of content to peruse. These switcher puzzles are 2D only though, which I suppose is fair enough for supplementary materials.
Rating: 3 out of 5.