Crew 167: The Grand Block Odyssey is a sliding block puzzle game. You play as an unnamed man who is aboard a spaceship as the only crew member. The ship is going through space to find a new habitable world because his home world, which wasn’t Earth, was heavily polluted by the people and they needed to find a new world to save the populous. He is also very depressed and anxious so he became some sort of guinea pig, at least that’s what I believe, for a company who put a chip in his head to strip him of some of his emotions, including the fear and anxiety, and to increase his productivity. This is the lore anyways, but you get to read some of his journals and he sounds fairly paranoid in many of them which indicates that those emotions have not been nullified like he and the company both claim.
The chip in his brain, yeah… it’s short circuiting, so now your character is super anxious and getting depressed, oh and he’s having hallucinations, so ummm GOOOOOOO ME! Fuck. These hallucinations are blocks and places for these blocks to sit. These blocks are the puzzles in the game. The block puzzles start off easy and get really hard moderately fast, I’ve spent like an hourish on a couple puzzles trying to figure them out, but most only take a few minutes. The blocks move like they’re on ice when pushed, and they head straight in said direction until they hit something and stop. You have to push the blocks until they land on a platform and light the blocks up. Sounds simple, yes? Well it’s not actually, and the game adds new mechanics to it constantly to make it more difficult. First it adds colored blocks and platformers, blocks that have a timer on them that, when it’s up, the block disappears, linked blocks that move in the opposite directions, blocks with ‘dots’ on them that tell you how many times the block can be moved before it just freezes in place, mats you have to move the block over to light them up and you need them all lit up before putting the block on the platform, and that’s just a few things they do to make it harder.
I got stuck on that last bit of difficulty increasing, cause there’s one so hard that I can’t figure it out. I’ve spent almost four hours in the game, but you can beat it in under fifty-five minutes. I’ve also gotten between sixty to eighty percent of the way done with the game. In the pause menu it actually tells you how far you are through the game which is nice. The game also tells you how many of the puzzles you’ve completed in each level, though you can’t go back to do previous ones so… that’s not useful for that, however it is useful to know how many more you have to do before you’ve completed them all for each area. You need to complete a certain amount of them to get through the level due to story reasons, then you need to do two more out of a few that you can finish as you’d like. After those two you can move to the next story area, however there’s achievements for beating all the puzzles before moving on for each level.
I don’t really know what else to say about the game, it’s a little clunky when moving the character, but the puzzles are good, hard as balls, but good. I’ve enjoyed the game so far, but I’m going to need a walkthrough or guide to finish the level I’m stuck on cause it’s just a bit too hard for me. It’s just a fun little puzzle game if you’re into block puzzles.
Crew 167: The Grand Block Odyssey was developed by oddbreeze.
Point of Sale: Steam.
$18
A review copy of the game was provided by the dev.
darkmikasonfire awards Crew 167: The Grand Block Odyssey the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval, just barely anyways, and hopes the next game’s character is a bit less blocky feeling. Hehehe blocks hehehehehe. That was good and unplanned.
Indie Gamer Team 