Review: Tidalis

One look at that Tidalis screenshot probably makes you think two things. One, that the world in which this game takes place is forever smothered in a healthy decuple-coat of vinyl paint. And two, that, oh great, there’s another match-three puzzle game on the PC and Mac -- the world doesn’t have enough of those. What you don't see is the surprisingly-deep brain-mangler of a puzzle game masked by Tidalis' familiar and saccharine appearance.

On the first count, you’d be right. Some of the background art is fine and pretty, but for the most part, the color palette looks like it must have been titled, “Candyland patio furniture.” The myriad creatures that populate the titular continent of Tidalis look like a colony of refugee gumball-machine toys. Meanwhile, the soundtrack bounds between contemplative (almost Zen-like) and hyperactive pseudo-island music sounds. It all makes for a candy-coated caliber of sweetness that you’re either going to find tasty or diabetes-inducing.

Personally, I erred more toward the former, but the extreme aesthetic variation in the character design was a turn-off, of sorts.

But art and world building aren’t why you’re playing Tidalis, I know. If you’re a puzzle gamer (I am not, but more on that later) then what you want to know is what makes this match-three game different (or, maybe, better?) than all the rest.

Tidalis works like this: blocks fall from above, stacking in columns, and need to be cleared from the board by matching like colors. If a column of blocks reaches the top of the board, you lose.

Instead of swapping out blocks to match three like colors, you click on blocks to create colored streams that cross through like-colored blocks (but the streams only travel for three spaces before fizzling out). The trick is in using the blocks to change the direction of the stream, trying to make longest chain possible. When a chain of at-least three is made, the blocks vanish, dropping the stack down.

But the fun doesn't end there. When blocks fall, they automatically generate a stream. Soon, you find yourself trying to think two, three, four, five steps ahead, wracking the left side of your brain to generate the longest, deepest, must sustained chains you can muster.

This is just the basic game. Thrown into the mix are special blocks: stone blocks that block streams and can only be removed from the game board by falling to the bottom; wooden blocks that block streams but can be burned by adjacent cleared red blocks; moon and sun blocks that can only chain, alternatingly, with each other -- and special rules: increased gravity changes the way streams travel; frantic mode increases the speed at which blocks fall, but allows you to create multiple streams simultaneously... The list of variables seems endless, when you consider how different rules and blocks can be mixed and matched to create all sorts of new challenges.

The story mode teaches you the game’s concepts as a long (long, long, long) tutorial that is, admittedly, very well-paced.

As soon as I was able to grasp a new concept, the game would turn up the heat and have me running. Most of the time, the end result was me banging my head against my desk, wondering how many layers of logic-puzzles the game could throw at me before I’d have an aneurysm. Oh, and making me feel quite dense in the process. Playing Tidalis for more than an hour made me want to cry (which makes me not only dense, but a dense baby).

So I stopped.

I am not a puzzle gamer.

But for those of you who are; for those of you undaunted by the likes of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest or Clash of Heroes; for those who find no sport in World of Goo or Plants Vs. Zombies, there’s Tidalis: a game that never ceases to build upon itself, exponentially, until the ethereal mind-space between your brain implodes into a singularity that devours reality as we know it.

What I’m saying is Tidalis is a puzzle game for the smarty-pants. Oh yeah, and there’s a level editor and multiplayer. Just be sure you know what you’re doing with both -- you wouldn’t want to disappoint your fellow smarty-pants with the former and I don’t want to find out what’s on the other end of the inevitable mind-hole that will be created from the psychic battle of logical reasoning with the latter.