Neves Review

Have you ever noticed that as the world develops, technology advances, and consumer goods get cheaper… that the gifts in Christmas crackers are still as crap as they’ve ever been? I mean, when I was about six years old, finding a small pack of colouring pencils, or a half-size plastic comb in amongst the debris of paper hats and rubbish jokes that fell out of one of these festive fireworks might’ve been vaguely exciting, but now, twenty (something) years on, when advances in vacuum-forming technology and cheap foreign labour have brought us to a point where kid’s comics are giving away handheld remote-control cars on the cover, and daily newspapers come with a free DVD, why is it that crackers, which seem to have increased exponentially in price over the years, still have the same cheap plastic tat in them?! I’ll tell you why: because the people who make them know that we’ll still buy them, even if the gifts are terrible, that’s why! Well not me bucko! Not anymore! Do you hear me?!

And this rant has what, exactly, to do with a Nintendo DS game, you ask? Well, aside from being a means for me to vent years of pent-up frustration at the unscrupulous world of big business without needing to pay for an expensive shrink, it’s actually because the first thing I was reminded of when I started to play Neves was a cracker gift. You must have seen them – the little packets which contain five or six pieces of flat, multi-coloured plastic, along with a jolly festive ‘challenge’ to construct a variety of shapes by putting them together in different ways. Considering that the real-world physical version of this is something that kept me amused for about as long as it took my relatives to read out the oh-so-crap, by now ancient jokes that accompany the cracker ‘gifts’ (they’re not even paying for new jokes people – someone needs to do something!) ie: not very long at all, it’s fair to say that I wasn’t actually expecting all that much from this game.

Oh how wrong I was – I simply couldn’t put it down! The concept is devilishly simple: on the top screen, you are shown a polygonal shape, in the form of an animal, or a flower, or a rocket, or whatever other angular depiction of a familiar object the graphic artists have managed to come up with. The bottom screen then shows an identical version of this in outline, and gives you seven variously shaped pieces which you must fit into the outline. Each piece can be dragged, rotated or flipped using the stylus… and that’s it. Get the pieces all in the right place, and the puzzle’s complete – simple as that. It sounds dull on paper, and it’s certainly no Grand Theft Auto IV, but for a handheld game it seems to fit just right – you just keep coming back for more.

I think the reason why it works is that it’s so laid-back. In the normal game mode, ‘Silhouettes’, there’s no time pressure at all, so you can just study the puzzle at your leisure. I guess it’s probably the same thing that attracts people to crossword puzzles and Soduku. If you want events with a bit of edge, then the ‘Time Pressure’ and ‘7Steps’ modes challenge you with a time limit or the opportunity to only make seven moves to finish the puzzle, while the two-payer ‘Bragging Rights’ mode allows you to go head to head against a friend to see who can complete each puzzle first.

So what’s wrong with it? Well aside from having a game mode called ‘Bragging Rights’, with instructions that the winner ‘reserves the right to brag’ – people! ‘bragging rights’ is NOT a gameplay feature! If this is the best you can do for a USP, don’t bother… really! – aside from my personal annoyance with this, the game’s biggest downfall is basically its biggest selling point: its simplicity.

For while the game boasts 500-odd puzzles, they are basically just more of the same. If the number or shape of the pieces you need to make fit changed, then maybe this wouldn’t be the case, but as it is, after the first ten or so challenges, your brain starts to learn what to look for – of the seven shapes, you start to quickly recognise which must go where. So it’s usually possible to place 3 or 4 of the shapes within just seconds of looking at the puzzle. This means you then only need to experiment a little with the remaining shapes to solve the thing. I went through just over a hundred of these puzzles in the process of writing this review, and of these, only about three of them stumped me for any length of time, and by ‘length of time’, I mean not much longer than the three minutes you get in Time Pressure mode – generally I finished each of them in under 30 seconds, and I’m hardly a MENSA member. 500 puzzles at around 30 seconds each… that’s just over four hours to finish the single player mode – not fantastic longevity. And as for the other modes… as they all use the same puzzle outlines, there’s no point tackling Time Pressure mode when you’ve already whipped the puzzle in the normal mode, and once you’ve completed a shape once, doing it in 7Steps mode is child’s play.

Don’t get me wrong, this is certainly a puzzle game worth getting, as – if you don’t rush through it like I did – it does offer some hours of entertainment, and is great for picking up when you’ve only got a few minutes to spare. A word of warning though: this game has the most annoying background music EVER, a jazz-style soundtrack that completely destroys the languid atmosphere of the gameplay. Play it with the sound off, or you’ll find yourself being driven slowly mad…