This was originally posted on the now-defunct Random Fury! videogame blog.
Hello everybody, this weeks Friday Random Game is: Ziva. Now, this is a genius puzzle game that may be a little too ambitious. The thing you control is a guy in this particular case, and he needs to get to the objective, which is a crystal, and you have all manner of tools at your disposal to make sure the two meet. You can double click a block to make the background change to the colour of the block you double-clicked – which also makes the blocks intangible. Be wary of clicking those blocks back into reality though, because if you are occupying a space which they once did, you will be pulverized.
You can also copy and paste an area of the level onto itself, very useful for creating bridges. Copy a section of blocks onto blocks of the same colour and they disappear, useful for creating passageways. Be wary of duplicating your objectives though – it may seem like a nice idea to make more crystals for you to take home with you, but once you hit one crystal, the level is over. Unless you duplicate yourself, of course, which you totally can do. You can also invert yourself, by pasting yourself onto a block – an invaluable technique for collecting inverted crystals.
Sound complicated? It is. It baked my noodle, that’s for sure. I got to level thirteen, and gave up after a long, hard, drawn out slog against some stupid lasers. It’s a good game for sure, with some great ideas, but it kind of feels like how I imagine Portal 2 would play if you’d never played the original Portal. Sure, portals are cool, but getting to know the gels as well? Mind-boggling. I dunno, maybe that analogy is wrong – I did play Portal before Portal 2 – I can’t remember whether there were as many portal-related tutorial style objectives early on in the second game as there were in the first.
Anyway, here’s the link again – http://www.gamezhero.com/games/ziva – see if you can get further than I did!
