Flowering Bricks
Apr. 28th, 2012 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnUse the mouse. Saving is automatic.
Okay!
But... how do I get that over to...
So how am I meant... but... how do those...
WHAT?!
Continuing the Japanese tradition of humble understatement last seen in Hatoful Boyfriend, this is an independent game called Hanano Puzzle ('Hanano' from the Japanese meaning "how the bastards am I meant to do this one".) I heard of it through the GameFAQs classic games board, where several members have been working their way through its challenges and demented PxTone music.
The idea of the game sounds simple - your only available move is to swap blocks horizontally, blocks will grow a flower in the direction of their arrow when they're next to another flower of the same colour, and your objective is to sprout all the blocks on the screen. In practice, the puzzles are so intricately put together and/or consistently sadistic that each one is a maddening challenge - rather appropriately, it really is about as hard as getting flowers to sprout out of bricks.
The game seems to intentionally go directly against the traditional puzzle progression of introducing a technique to you and then encouraging you to use it - instead, what this does is force you to discover a new technique in order to complete the level in front of you, right from the very start. Level 1 is something that I'd expect to find towards the end of a stretch of levels in most other games - instead of giving you a small demonstrative level to play around in, it drops you right into working out how to use the blocks in secondary ways and the physical effects of growing flowers out of them. But after a couple of these puzzles, it lets you believe you're getting somewhere and you make some fast progress until you run into the next flowery brick wall.
I've had a week or so of on-and-off struggling, and I'm now on level 15. There are fifty of them. This is going to be a long game.
Oh, come on.
Hanano Puzzle
Okay!
But... how do I get that over to...
So how am I meant... but... how do those...
WHAT?!
Continuing the Japanese tradition of humble understatement last seen in Hatoful Boyfriend, this is an independent game called Hanano Puzzle ('Hanano' from the Japanese meaning "how the bastards am I meant to do this one".) I heard of it through the GameFAQs classic games board, where several members have been working their way through its challenges and demented PxTone music.
The idea of the game sounds simple - your only available move is to swap blocks horizontally, blocks will grow a flower in the direction of their arrow when they're next to another flower of the same colour, and your objective is to sprout all the blocks on the screen. In practice, the puzzles are so intricately put together and/or consistently sadistic that each one is a maddening challenge - rather appropriately, it really is about as hard as getting flowers to sprout out of bricks.
The game seems to intentionally go directly against the traditional puzzle progression of introducing a technique to you and then encouraging you to use it - instead, what this does is force you to discover a new technique in order to complete the level in front of you, right from the very start. Level 1 is something that I'd expect to find towards the end of a stretch of levels in most other games - instead of giving you a small demonstrative level to play around in, it drops you right into working out how to use the blocks in secondary ways and the physical effects of growing flowers out of them. But after a couple of these puzzles, it lets you believe you're getting somewhere and you make some fast progress until you run into the next flowery brick wall.
I've had a week or so of on-and-off struggling, and I'm now on level 15. There are fifty of them. This is going to be a long game.
Oh, come on.
Hanano Puzzle
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Date: 2012-04-28 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-28 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 12:06 am (UTC)I've also now just bostumized my Windows install trying to get an AMD Catalyst driver onto it, which involved an autodetection program that would download an installer downloading program which would then download the installer, all of which insisted on climbing onto the system disk in different and sometimes inexplicable locations which I didn't dare change because half of the time developers put installation-location questions in as a sort of ritual sacrifice rather than anything directly meaningful, whereupon the driver hung on boot, and then the uninstaller, upon realizing that I was in Safe Mode and so it couldn't load the driver to detect which drivers it was supposed to uninstall, presented me with a seemingly reasonable-looking list of components to choose from and then drove into a tree like in the beginning of Uninvited when I tried to actually select any of them to remove.
… right.
Edit: Ohhhh. I see people talking about the music. I wonder if it quits if it doesn't find an audio device. Damn. Hmm.
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Date: 2012-04-29 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 02:37 pm (UTC)Level 15 is… amusing.
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Date: 2012-04-28 11:45 pm (UTC)I
will get you for thisaccept this as partial revenge for all the times I have previously gotten you for thisno subject
Date: 2012-04-30 04:22 pm (UTC)I got past level 20 only by desperately looking around on Google and following some fairly strong hints from a forum I found - as of level 21, I've officially given it up, although I think it's fairly obvious that I'm going to start it up anyway as soon as I get home from work.
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Date: 2012-04-30 07:11 pm (UTC)#21 is simple; it's a nice breather after #20. I think #27 is my favorite of this level block so far; arranging to make the part on the right-hand side not, er, get stuck prematurely requires, hmm, some forethought.
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Date: 2012-04-29 12:44 am (UTC)Anyway, stonewalled at Lv 12 for now, gonna let my brain cool off for a bit.
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Date: 2012-04-30 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-30 07:50 am (UTC)WHY CAN'T I PULL MYSELF AWAY FROM THIS THING!?!?!
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Date: 2012-04-30 02:12 pm (UTC)Then I saw level 21, and it can go and boil its head.
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Date: 2012-04-30 08:29 pm (UTC)*click*
--Oh hell. D:
EDIT: Oh, uhhh...never mind, got it. O_o;
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Date: 2012-05-01 05:05 am (UTC)EDIT: ...Okay, I lied, quitting at 30 for the night. ...I hope.
EDIT #2: ....31. Good lord this game is addictive.
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Date: 2012-05-01 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-02 05:51 am (UTC)On a happier note, however, I'm finally up to 32. (Which fell in about 4 minutes. O_o; )
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Date: 2012-04-30 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-30 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 05:28 am (UTC)Was just googling the game's name to see if I could find anything else about it and stumbled upon this. I just want you to know that after those last few levels, looking back something like level 15 just seems so... quaint in retrospect. It's not easy but that's barely a 3 our of 10 on this game's cruelty scale (spoiler: it goes much higher than 10).
For everyone else, hello and run away from this game before it destroys your mind.
...I do love how the universal reaction to this game is to curse whomever introduced one to it, even amongst those who enjoy it.
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Date: 2012-04-30 02:47 am (UTC)You apparently weren't here for the Hatoful Livestreams...our minds are already destroyed.
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Date: 2012-04-30 04:47 pm (UTC)As Hatoful Boyfriend was already mentioned - it does feel rather like when we were at the stage when people who had played some of the more unhinged routes were amused by people's reaction to the relative mundanity of the game's introduction. To combined a lot of phrases from people who saw it at the time - they were already fifteen steps down the landmine-covered staircase laughing at the people on the third one, not knowing that the staircase was seven thousand steps long (and ended in a moat of pudding).
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Date: 2012-05-01 05:29 am (UTC)Technically I use yahoo to search but this was in the top 10 results as of when I posted so it can't be that "discovered" just yet ;)
For what it is worth the game ramps the difficulty back down quite a bit after the horror that is stage 20. 21 and 22 initially look a bit rough but are relatively simple.
"I'm not enormously pleased with the person who introduced this to me either (fortunately for him, I can't quite remember who first mentioned it)."
It was Sci I swear! I mean it's a 50-50 shot that it was my write-up that put the thought in your head but either way Sci wrote about it first and got me playing so... yeah, totally Sci's fault :)
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Date: 2012-04-29 05:42 am (UTC)The Japanese are not the only ones as we have driver, brick breaker, and other free copycat game titles.
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Date: 2012-04-30 04:49 pm (UTC)I do remember those sort of generic names that were copies of games for the Commodore 64 :)
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Date: 2012-05-15 02:57 am (UTC)This is far beyond the Layton sliding-tile puzzles. At least those have some satisfaction in just sliding the tiles around randomly.
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Date: 2012-05-20 11:26 pm (UTC)