Ilomilo Is Everything I Hate About Starbucks, Only Cuter

When I first heard about Ilomilo, I was excited to start playing it. A cute puzzle game that I can play with my friends? Sign me up! Sadly the game was a pretty big disappointment and now I’m puzzled as to why anyone still likes it.

Ilomilo, developed by South End Interactive and released on the XBLA, is about two “safkas”, a made up race of thumb people as far as I can guess, named Ilo and Milo. They are separated in the park one day and you have to help them get back to one another.  Along the way they pick up other safkas who are stranded, as well as memory spheres as they unlock bits of their past, and discover who they really are.

To explain why I don’t like Ilomilo, I think it would be best to describe my ire for Starbucks. Starbucks is a company that (successfully) marketed itself by copying local coffee shops. They’ve got the modern décor, the snarky baristas, the menu with “inside” jokes, and plenty of other trash that people line up for every single day. After spending all this time building an image as this really great coffee shop, they forgot to make really great coffee. However, by copying all these other shops it doesn’t really feel like Starbucks has its own identity, so it just comes off as stale unimaginative tripe.

That’s what Ilomilo feels like to me. It tries really hard to be this cute adorable puzzle game but it only comes off as contrived and forced. In between loading screens they give little back stories on the world of Ilomilo to give you an idea of just how “cute” this world really is. One of the loading screens talks about how the moving cube doesn’t really like apple cubes, he really likes some other cube food, but he can’t afford it because he can’t reach his wallet. Another talks about how the stretchy cube learned how to stretch after 1000 years of evolution so that it could reach his hat on the top hook.

This isn’t cute, this is dumb. The idea that someone thought this would be cute irritates me. All of the cubes are named after what they do — moving cube, flying cube, stretchy cube — which is fine by me if they’re just tools, but they’re NOT. The game is trying to imply that the cubes are somehow sentient. And they’re not content with their roles as the game informs me in another loading screen. Oh no. The cubes tried going to barber school to learn how to become mustache stylists but stopped after they realized that it’s hard to trim facial hair if you have no arms.

What about this is endearing? Either I’m so black-hearted that I’m immune to the game’s charm, or the game doesn’t have that much to begin with. The game tried so hard to make this cute world that it just comes off as forced and disgusting. And don’t even get me started on Sebastian, the ladybug riding fox hunter, or whatever his ridiculous back story is. The game throws these “cute” motifs and themes that don’t really mean or say anything. Cute for the sake of cute gets old pretty quickly.

You know what though? I’ve spent a lot of time on the design and I’ve skipped over the puzzles themselves. Hey! Sort of like what they did for this thing! I’m not a big fan of puzzle games, but that’s only because I’m not very good at them. That was not the case with Ilomilo. The game is split up into four chapters — each one presenting different game mechanics to master. The basic premise doesn’t change though — cubes bridge gaps, cubes move, cubes turn you around. Once you get that it’s no longer a matter of “I wonder what to do”; it simply becomes a matter of recognizing where the blocks need to be placed and putting them there. As if that wasn’t an easy enough task, the game assumes you’re mentally incapable of figuring it out, and puts a face on the cubes you’re supposed to put the cubes on. Come on Ilomilo, you’re supposed to be a puzzle game. I don’t need nor expect you to hold my hand. The only time Ilomilo becomes slightly challenging is on the twelve bonus levels, for which there are three on each chapter. Admittedly I had a lot of trouble trying to solve them, especially in comparison with the rest of the game, but I wasn’t having any fun with them at all. That’s the worst sin any game can commit, and this makes the bigger sin of puzzle games by not being very difficult. I’m not sure which one I should feel more perturbed by.

I guess the thing that disappoints me the most about Ilomilo is that it offers up so much potential. It has really good puzzle mechanics I haven’t seen before and the design of the world is pretty. It’s just too bad that they didn’t bother creating a challenging, engaging, or even interesting game.