Wonders Inc.

Wonders Inc. is an interesting puzzle collection made by Glue. There are three difficulty levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. At each level, you have to beat one puzzle to pass to the other. Each level contains 5 different puzzles.

PRESENTATION
Puzzle games don't depend much on graphics and soundtrack to be fun, but these are important aspects in any game nonetheless, and they are not the strong points of Wonders Inc.
The music in this game is just a random selection of midi files, scattered throughout the game with no apparent relation to the puzzles they're used in. Some of them are nice, some of them aren’t, some of them sound original, some of them are RTP, but they don’t have any real impact on the game. Also, I noticed sometimes the midi volume was turned down, and I don't know if it was intentional or a bug.
The graphics are also a small set of simple overused tilesets and charsets. Mapping is decent. There are some huge graphical sloppiness issues, though. At the very first map of the game, there's a sign that shows a text on the bottom half of the screen, though the custom message window appears on top.



I thought "silly mistake, but at least there's a custom message window". This window never shows up again in the game, leaving you with transparent text all the time, which is not always bad, but sometimes makes reading almost impossible.



There are also some minor passability issues in some maps. Another thing that intrigued me a bit was the fact the basic sprite of the main character is transparent.



Overall, I think there was no real effort put into the presentation of Wonders Inc.

STORY AND WRITING
Like I've said in my last 2 reviews of puzzle games, I believe such games don't need a story, but if they try adding one, it has got to be a good one. At the very beginning of the game, you're introduced to an area full of NPCs talking about the challenges of Wonders Inc., like it's some sort of contest with a cash prize. This introduction worked well enough to create some hype about the puzzles. After that you enter a reception room with 3 girls, each opening your way to a puzzle level (beginner, intermediate or advanced).
That's that, no more story. From this point, this game is just puzzles and instructions. It would be nice if there was more mentioning to the contest aspect of the game, maybe through dialogs with other contestants, an ending that said something about the prize, etc. I saw none of that. Actually, I didn't see an ending to this game at all. Looking at the editor, there were ending maps, but I have no idea how to get to them, even though I beat (or, should I say, "beat" - see below) all the puzzles.
Despite this lack of coherent story, the writing is overall very clear and solid.

THE PUZZLES
You can only go to a new difficulty level is you've beaten the previous one. So you have to start the game at beginner level. The first puzzles are extremely simple, some kind of warm-up: get a stick, put fire on it, light a torch, leave room. The same style of puzzle gets slightly more complicated at the following rooms, as you have to press switches and open passages to get access to the items you need.



These first puzzles require little thinking and a little bit of patience, especially at the final beginner puzzles, where the maps are bigger and there are more items and switches. Even at this point, I have to say I didn't find the puzzles to be too much fun. But they didn't annoy me either. So far so good.

The puzzle style of the beginner level is maintained at intermediate level, with one addition: now, besides pressing switches and getting items, you have to DODGE HUNDREDS OF FAST-WALKING ROBOTS ON THE SCREEN THAT MAKE YOU RESET THE ENTIRE PUZZLE WITH ONE HIT.



If you ask me how difficult that is... I'll answer by saying that, even though I cheated, (Yes I did. Sue me.) by pressing ctrl to walk through walls, I "died" many many times in those puzzles. And there were many of them, each one with a bigger map and a few dozen more robots. I would never ever ever try to beat this game without cheating, because it's extremely frustrating and it doesn't pay off. There's a thin line between challenging and annoying, and I believe that line was crossed by this moment in the game. And it didn't go back.

Unfortunately having to cheat, I beat the intermediate level. Now I got to the advanced level. Let me tell you what the first puzzle of advanced level was like: think switches + one-touch-kill-robots + directional movement tiles + darkness. That's what you got.



I did try to beat this puzzle without cheating, like all others. I tried like 15 times just this one.
The following puzzles abandon the switch-robot pattern, and there was more variation. Some of them were actually quite interesting, and some of them were absurdly terrible, like that huge town full of talking NPCs and interactable objects that did NOTHING to the solution of the puzzle. It was just a huge time waster, since all you had to do was talk to a single NPC at the bottom of the map.
Finally I got to this particular advanced puzzle in which you have to get 3 items in order while walking through a seaload of moving objects and dodging whirl obstacles that made you reset the puzzle.



That was when I reached the conclusion that the creator of this game was (hopefully unconsciously) TRYING to annoy the player. He was probably like "Hahahaha I'm gonna fill the map with randomly moving objects, let's see if some stupid player can beat this haahahahaah", something like an evil genius designing a dungeon. After this point, I decided I would finish this game so just I could write this review.

I also want to mention that there's a very serious programming problem with the boss battle of the game, in which you have push an object over a pentagram tile, but the events that detect the object position doesn't work properly.

EXTRA FEATURES
Apart from the basic puzzles, there are some cool extra features in this game.
1. You can talk to a guy at the reception and change your walking sprite. I thought it was a nice touch, and even nicer because some forms are unlockable or purchasable (though I never found any money in the game).
2. The entire game is timed and your records are registered, so even after you beat each level you can play them again to see if you get a better time score.
3. After you beat the game, there are 3 extra puzzles with a style slightly different than the previous ones.


SO WHAT?
The original idea of a puzzle game appealed to me, and the initial impression of having a story involved seemed even better. Sadly, most puzzles (with a few notable exceptions) are poorly developed repetitions of common RPG puzzles. The real problem with this game is that the creator seemed to be worried only about making one puzzle harder than the other, but he only got them to be more annoying over time. No consideration for fun. Challenge is not always equal fun. Beating a hard puzzle may bring some chance of achievement, but more often than not in this game, it's only relief.

I was in doubt as to what score should I give this game, but I decided not giving it a very low one because, despite all the flaws, the game doesn't have many bugs, it's consistent within itself and there are some actual moments of fun in the experience.