“Political platform puzzler.” Not enough to interest you?
How about “Water-colored style with platforming puzzler adventure.” Yes?

Heck, we’ll just throw a screenshot at your face, and see if it catches your eyes.

Clover: A Curious Tale

Now, just by looking at it, we can already see gamers will either love it or hate it. Yes, this is probably not another quick eye candy you would see at your local gaming store. So is that a good thing or not? How the hell should we know? Just imagine yourself playing this very simple-to-control, but brain-cell challenging puzzle games, based on hand-sketched designs with water-color visuals. Would you rather play another zOMG-it’s-a-sandbox-game, or would you give this a try?

Simple enough, the sentences I’ve put together pretty much explain the game. Notice the word “political” when we explained the genre at the very first sentence of this review. Well, as usual, we won’t even touch anything that might be a spoiler, but let’s just say that there are some tensions between every side of the story. It won’t get in your way of enjoying the game though; it’s not preachy and you’ll be busy burning up your brain cells solving the puzzles anyway.

A dialogue that would put smiles on orphans. Oh, wait..

The graphics are cool. You see, there’s a difference between good and cool. It doesn’t have the crazy lighting your latest graphics card might have to process. And the resolution of the game is fixed so unless you’re playing in a windowed mode, many LCD users will witness blurs. That’s not always good. But as I stated, the game looks cool and pretty. I’ve tested it on a 1280×1024 resolution with a windowed mode and I didn’t find any problems with the visuals. The design is unique and artsy, and personally I think it deserves more than some flashy, polished graphics. True, there are prettier designs out there, but the characters, background and the whole visual concept works as a whole balanced design. It’s rather a bold move to push such ideas and bring it into gaming life. If anyone else complains about the design, I say let them make their own game, then we’ll talk, review style.

The voice acting was surprisingly good, and it was well-recorded and mixed, considering the size of the production and staff involved. Maybe we Americans can’t tell the difference between good and bad voice acting as long as there’s a British accent to it, but it really was pleasant many times. It was the background music that was a bit repetitive, and was getting old. The repeating of soothing piano tracks won’t help you much when you’re stuck in a puzzle and running around the map for long periods of time to figure it out. The music isn’t bad or annoying at all, but just wished that there could be more for us to juice it out. We’ve found many fans actually did like the soundtrack and it’s just another subjective way to critique I guess.

Control of the game is as simple as it gets; you can literally play with just one hand. That’s what she said, but it’s true. The game supports a Xbox360 controller but there’s no need since you can use the UP key to jump and the DOWN key to pickup or use the items. Simple as that. The game system is very simple yet clever; you just put the items into your inventory and bring it to the scene where the items are needed to solve the puzzles. Sometimes you have to mix the right kind of items to create a new one, so don’t get stuck in two-dimensional thinking just because the game is.

I couldn't agree more, my friend!

This game actually originated from a game called “Clover” for XBLA. When Binary Tweeds have decided to release the game for the PC, they also decided to fix the game here and there. The list of fix/updated game features do include visuals, controls and sub-quests so it’s not a simple revision but rather an update of the original version. The new version is over 150MB which exceeds the limit of XBLA (or XBLIG in U.K). The fans of the original version would have to purchase it again for the PC. Considering the price (roughly $10), it’s still a fraction of the price of the majority of games out there.

This is the kind of game that has nostalgic effect, but only because the game system is stubborn to be classic. But I wouldn’t tell Binary Tweeds to fix a thing. In fact, I would encourage games like this to be developed because sometimes we need classic, yet refreshing taste. I’m pretty sure that platforming-puzzle games aren’t for everyone, and many peopled are so used to the dumbed down gaming system fun (kill, escort while kill and then kill some more), but man oh man, the sensation of solving a puzzle after struggling for a long time.. It’s just worth it. Well-worth it indeed.

Our Score: 7.5 /10

A very classy puzzler. Nothing like it, and that’s for sure.