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Bob Came in Pieces review

You may not have noticed, but there is a rising indie gaming developer out there with a repertoire of casual games such as Lean Game and On-Scene Commander, and they are called Ludosity Interactive. Their latest offering is another casual game preparing to break through, called Bob Came in Pieces.

Bob is a friendly alien in space, but on his way to work he managed to crash land on a strange planet and lose a few pieces of his amazing spacecraft. This is where the player can take charge and begin to explore the game. Controlling Bob’s spaceship is as simple as using the arrow keys for direction. Don’t worry about bumping into anything; apparently after crashing his ship it is now indestructible. While the player assists Bob in learning about this new planet he can discover some of his fallen parts, such as more powerful boosters, or tractor beams. Using the in-game ship editor, the player can design Bob’s ship however they see fit. It is a simple drag and drop interface, and allows for saving your creations for use later on; a very useful feature for reusing a particular design for similar puzzles that are often used. The in-game ship editor is well refined and simple to use, and it needs to be for this game.

Bob’s ship has 8 external connectors that the player can put pieces onto, like thrusters, tractor beams, or extenders that are angled. You can only use parts that Bob finds in his travels, and they conveniently turn up just in time for when they’re needed to progress. For example, there was a small narrow gap which led to the base of a towering pillar blocking the path. A nearby straight expander part attached to a horizontal connector was able to prod the tower and topple it over. This was the introduction to the physics in the game.

The physics in Bob Came in Pieces are both elaborate and key to the game, allowing for complex puzzles to hinder Bob’s progress through the world, and to intrigue the player on the way. The gameplay is simple at first and steadily increases in difficulty over 15 chapters. Well, except for a few hitches in the fluidity, with frustrating and overly difficult puzzles or tasks that sometimes feel out of place. However, although the control setup is simple, the actual movements of the ship can occasionally be frustratingly unexpected, especially with the tractor beam which seems to pull the ship towards the object rather than the other way around. There also isn’t a way to make it stronger other than increasing the number of thrusters on your ship.

The overarching gameplay is often simple in each level. They can be completed fairly quickly with the minimum amount of puzzles to complete, but the longevity comes from finishing all of the physics-based puzzles to access the extra ship parts These are the ones which will help with other side mission-style puzzles for even more parts. It’s not something you can attempt to do part-way through the game, because you probably won’t have collected sufficient enough parts to complete the puzzle. No, if you wanted to collect every piece of the ship in the game, you must do so by diligently completing every puzzle from the start.

Being a casual game, it is more about the gameplay than the story. The narrative is fairly basic and the gap between chapters is glued together with a generic monologue from Bob and his travels. The story is nothing to complain about though, and each level gradually takes Bob through different environments ranging from cavernous mines to snowy tundras. It appeals at an entertaining level, but the depth ends there.

I played through this game on my MacBook, one of the platforms that the game is available on. This gives us the opportunity to do some basic cross-platform comparison. The Macbook just about coped, but the resolution was unchangeable, and the range of settings were limited. The PC coped tremendously well, with a range of options for graphics. Overall I feel like Ludosity should have paid more attention to MacOS X, but it’s nice to see that they made a start.

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