El Dorado

El Dorado is a tricky and fun German puzzle game made in RPG Maker 2000. You play as Hernando, a greedy explorer who finds himself lost in a strange land. He must survive the perils of the land, and in the meanwhile, get gold and become rich.

I was quickly drawn to this game because:
- I love puzzles.
- It was made by the same guy who'd made a game I loved.
- It got a very praiseful review.

My initial reaction to this game was great. It it a very cute game. The graphics are not only quite nice, but there are a lot of animations for the main character and his interactions with the environment, and they are very funny.

The sound effects are also fitting, and the music is soothing.

So let's talk about the game itself.

The game is divided in stages. Each stage is consisted of one single-screen map, in which your goal is to get a gold bar. The gold bar is either out of reach or protected in some way. To reach the bar and/or break the protection you must get certain objects, and use them in other objects to produce various effects on that map, until you finally get what you want. I'll take the liberty to spoil the solution to the first map, just so you can have a clear picture:



1 - Get a wooden stick from that pile.
2 - Hit the jellyfish with it and collect its body.
3 - Throw the jellyfish over that crab and collect the crab claw.
4 - Cut the tree with the crab claw and collect the vines.
5 - Use vines to climb.

It's basically a simple puzzle game that requires a little thinking and a LOT of trial-and-error. It's challenging and fun... oh, and did I say cute? But it's extremely frustrating, and I'll tell you why:

- Pretty much everything can kill you. You see that tree with a rock on it? It will kill you. See that fish? It will scare you to death. The jellyfish will electrocute you if you touch it before getting the stick... and so on. Everything will kill you. In a map with maybe over a dozen of objects, figuring out the one that WON'T kill you may be hard. Especially since sometimes it's not clear which objects are interactible. And there are objects in the maps that don't do anything ever... besides killing you.
- When you die, you have to restart the level.
- You can only save the game every three levels.
- The levels are timed to one-minute. In the first levels it doesn't matter much, but 1 minute is a very short time for the last levels.
- Did I mention everything can kill you?

My frustration threshold is not very high, but I love puzzles, and this game is charming. I didn't mind trying 10 or 20 times on the first levels. Dying is actually fun on the first times, because there are just so many ways to die! But the game gets too hard too quickly. And it's not skill-kind of hard. It's guess-kind of hard. Sometimes it takes a lot of trials to guess what's next to do.

I will admit, I didn't finish the game. I checked the video walkthrough a few times at first, and when I found myself checking it too often (starting from level 8), I decided I should better just quit the game and watch what was left. My biggest problem with this game is that it seldom requires any thinking. It does, sometimes. But most of the time you will be just guessing... and dying in the process.

Oh, and I played the game on Normal, but there is a Hard difficulty. I honestly don't want to know what it's like.

This game is in German, which was mostly not a problem, but there were times when I found myself getting items and not knowing what they were, which may have made it difficult for me to know what to do with them.

Bottom line, this is a good game, the presentation is quite nice, it's not too long and the difficulty progression is balanced, but don't play it if you're not in for a lot of... dying.

By the way, I just found out there is a sequel, El Dorado 2. But I haven't got the guts to play it.