Some of the environments were cleaned up in this remaster, and they look as charming as any hand-drawn game of the era. The Zoombinis are adorable, and their animations are very well done.
#LOGICAL JOURNEY OF THE ZOOMBINIS TOADS LILYPADS PC#
One of the benefits of being a mid-90’s PC game is that there are some nice hand drawn backgrounds sprinkled throughout the game. The game does have some nice things going for it. This results in some hilarious moments, especially when he finally gets his perfectly designed pizza. This is a particularly amusing puzzle, as you have to throw on a myriad of different toppings to determine exactly what he wants. Easily the star of the show, you have to determine what a tree-stump-character-thing wants on his pizza. There’s a particularly memorable one that I already mentioned: The pizza making puzzle. There are other types of puzzles, as well. It makes the puzzles more challenging, sure, but it doesn’t provide a reason to keep playing through the game other than making your brain work a little bit harder. There are only twelve puzzles in the entire game, and increasing the difficulty doesn’t change the structure of the puzzles much. Unfortunately, in terms of puzzle structure, this doesn’t allow for a whole lot of variation. Each Zoombini has four different features: hair, eyes, nose color, and feet, and about half of the puzzles are based around logically placing the Zoombinis into groups based on the differences between their features. These puzzles are entertaining and can make you think a bit, but it’s unfortunate that they are so limited. As the Zoombinis travel across the land, they must complete logical puzzles, like crossing bridges that are allergic to your feet, making pizzas for fat wooden stoner creatures, and jumping across lily pads on top of giant frogs. The goal of the game is a traditional one: Simply complete all the levels in the game to rescue the Zoombinis from their evil captors. The biggest problem with the 2015 Steam release of Zoombinis is that it’s just not very interesting. Zoombinis is a PC game that absolutely falls into this category. Older games that are either remastered or re-released can often fall victim to the nostalgic tint of the past, causing us to misremember the greatness of any given release. It was a simple game of puzzles and logic that challenged my young mind and remained in my consciousness until this very day. These games taught me everything I know! One day, a game called Logical Journey of the Zoombinis showed up in my fourth-grade classroom and I was immediately hooked after playing it. For me, Mario Teaches Typing, The Oregon Trail, and Microsoft Paint dominated the 30 minutes of “computer time” we got every day at school. Despite this disappointing development, I resolved to better myself by playing video games that made me smarter. As much as I hate to admit it, I was a child myself at one point in my life.