Toodee and Topdee #review #indie #game #steampowered

Game

Jeroen's Indie Reviews

4 years ago

Toodee and Topdee

Toodee and Topdee (Toodee being a pun to 2D and topdee being a pun to Topdown) is a puzzle game that combines the 2D platformer games with top-down view games, in order to create a nice puzzle game. Unfortunately, although a page exists on Game Jolt, the demo was only released on Steam.

The game's story makes a parody on typical game coding things (or coding in general), by creating a kind of God (read: coder), named ALEPH who created worlds, separated by the semi-colon (derived from the fact that many languages like C, Pascal and many other languages based on one those two use the ; as a a separator).

One world is that of Toodee

And that world is that of the 2D platformer. The controls are pretty straight forward here. Move left right or jump.

The other world is that of Topdee, and that is the world of topdown games.

The typical things you can do in a top down game, like moving in all 4 directions, pushing crates, or picking them up or dropping them.

However, ALEPH has an assistant named TOODOO who would help ALEPH to fix all errors that could happen along the way (TOODOO can therefore be seen as the debugger), however as everything was near completion, TODOO realized that he would no longer be needed soon. And thus removed the semi-colon. In normal coding it means most languages (there are exceptions) will normally not compile your code anymore, but in the case of this universe it messed things up, and well, TOODEE and TOPDEE got mixed up in one world.

From this point the game will get to work as a kind of coop puzzle game. As common for these kinds of games the two characters must help each other with unique skills the other cannot provide, however, the difference between a platformer and a topdown view game, THAT is really really a different twist to these kinds of games.

Now don't make the mistake that TOPDEE makes the game too easy for TOODEE, as I was wondering about that myself, and in the first levels, this is certainly so, but that is merely to make sure you can learn the concept as you are playing. Which is by the way a very good way to go, the best way to learn a game is by playing and not by tons of tutorials (only an idiot would say otherwise),

Now not only gravity takes a different shape on objects, but on enemies as well. The pigs lethal to both heroes, will follow TOPDEE around in topdown view, but remain on their platfrom in side view. This also requires more thinking and also perfect timing.

There is also aquatic puzzles, where water will flow out of the drains in TD view, but flow back in in 2D view.

But TOPDEE can by placing crates onto the drains make sure all the water comes to one place only, which can help TOODEE (who can swim) in getting stuff done.

And soon the puzzles will come to a difficulty in which using your brain is more and more required, as more elements are added in which the two have to rely on each other more and more.

So all-in-all the concept was really well thought out. The graphics are very nice and cute, and the controls are very smooth. The game does a very good job is beginning easy, but boosting the difficulty up. I've tried the game with both gamepad and keyboard and both were really working out well.