Elf dentistry aside, our next game involves a toy box. A MAGIC toy box. In fact a magic toy CHEST. What would you expect a magic toy chest to do? Well I would think make toys. I mean it’s magic, and it’s a toy chest, what possible magic could a toy chest do, but magically produce toys. At least that’s what I was thinking. Didn’t you at least a little bit think about that when I said it? Apparently the MAGIC toy chest doesn’t like to make toys either. Nope, it was all a clever ploy by Johnny (or Jimmy, or Timmy, or whoever that kid’s name is), to get you to help him do his chores. I mean his Mom tells him to clean up the room and does Johnny get industrious enough to do it himself, heck no. Sure just promise any Joe that there’s a magic toy chest awaiting him and then cruelly snatch it away and tell him he has to help you put away the toys.
That’s the premise of our next game “The Magic Toy Chest” by Graduate Games. You can either pick a boy or a girl, but basically you have to help them clean the room. Magic Toy Chest is a physics based puzzle game. So you have to some how hit, knock over, or shove toys by using other toys until they magically fall into the toy chest. Hmm maybe this what they meant by Magic Toy Chest. In any case, there’s a tutorial to start. On the whole it was too frustrating to be fun. The music while appropriate quickly became annoying. You didn’t find out until several levels into the tutorial, that sometimes you’ll have to restart the level, which I had to do frequently in the tutorial levels. Also you don’t know that you can pick up a toy you’ve dropped when you run out of toys, until you come to the tutorial level that tells you. I should have read the instructions I guess. When I finally came to the first real level, I played it for a while before giving up on it as it was too hard for me.
The interface is rather simple, just left click to select a toy from your arsenal, ahem, I mean your toy box, and left click to drop them. Right click to “pick up” an already dropped toy. The right side of the screen shows your time, what your goal is (that is what toy or toys to put in the chest) and how many of the current selected to you have to drop. Oh I forgot to mention, first you have to collect a bunch of keys, by clicking on them, and then finally clicking on the chest to open it. Why that’s even in there, I don’t know. In any case, the menus are supposed to be colorful and easy to read. In fact it looks like a children’s game (I have nothing against children’s games), however it is anything but. The menus are arranged in a hodge-podge fashion, that doesn’t really seem to have any stylistic concerns at all. The sounds are a non-issue, but as I said above the music gets highly annoying.
Sorry to sound so negative. It seems the developers did work hard on it. This game does have potential, but it needs some tweaking and polishing, in my humble opinion. There may be some people that find this fun, I just find it frustrating.
Final Analysis: Need to make it more user friendly. Some people may find it fun, others like me, will find it frustrating. Hopefully these guys will improve it as time goes on. Or maybe people will love it and they won’t need to :-)
Name: The Magic Toy Chest
Developer: Graduate Games
Price: $19.95
Where you can get it: Here.
Edit June 18th, 2009: The developer says they have created a patched that addressed the difficulty of some of the puzzles, and improved the tutorial. I will possibly look into re-reviewing it in the near future.
Tags: game, games, Graduate Games, independent, Indie, physics, point'n'click, review, reviews, windows