9/14/20 Devious Designs (1991)

Devious Designs (1991) by Peter James Baron and Bob Stevenson, published by Mirrorsoft for Amiga. This game is… flawed? It’s a puzzle game where the aim is to assemble Tetris-like blocks into place to complete shapes that become recognizable objects. That’s a good enough concept that I actually enjoy quite a bit, as you must pick up, pull, and toss them into place while dealing with things like gravity shifting, but there’s all of this other, seemingly unnecessary *stuff* going on. As soon as you start the game, you’re trying to wrangle with the admittedly awkward joystick controls, and suddenly things are dropping from thin air. You pick them up and find out that they’re points; I saw at least ten different pickups, all of which were just points. This presents an oddity because there’s also a time limit, but more pickups drop the longer you stay in a level; so, are you meant to beat them as quickly as possible or stay to rack up score? Points don’t do anything, so it just kind of misleads the player. At the same time, enemies are spawning in. It isn’t really clear what they are at first, some kind of wizard throwing tornadoes? Who is that? Do I want to touch those? Wait, I can shoot in this game? It’s yet another distraction from what’s really the core gameplay. The limited lives system, coupled with the time limit, coupled with the figure-it-out-yourself controls, coupled with noisy item spawn, coupled with poorly communicated enemies, coupled with one hit kills, makes this a hard one to recommend. It isn’t impossible to get past, though, and the music, composed by Martin Walker, is quite good. The graphics are pleasing as well, with high resolution pixel art and a charmingly erratic art style. And again, the core puzzle gameplay is fun, so I can’t say this is a hard pass. Maybe this concept is done more clearly in another game, or is just waiting to be made.