For those who thought Kirby’s Epic Yarn was a touch too menacing, twee downloadable puzzler ilomilo is a perfect non-threatening alternative.
Like Kirby, ilomilo‘s plot is quintessential storybook fare. Every day, antenna-sporting candy-colored best friends Ilo and Milo have a standing playdate to meet up and drink tea, or sometimes just to stare at the scenery together while munching on snacks. The thing is, they’re both a tad forgetful and have a tendency to space on their exact meeting spot. It’s the player’s job to unite the quirky pals, taking turns controlling each one as they navigate the game’s nearly 50 whimsical, gravity-defying and increasingly labyrinthine mazes.
And blowing through the game would really be a waste, since there are lots of good reasons to sit back and enjoy the ride. Each world is lush and imaginative, and some of the later levels require methodical spatial thinking so taxing that you won’t mind pausing for a few moments, staring at the googly-eyed clouds or mustachioed flying Rolf-looking creatures whizzing around in the distance. Like in Kirby’s Epic Yarn, the absence of danger and the presence of so many damn collectibles creates a nurturing environment for exploration. Weirdly, the cutesy aesthetics made it that much easier to cuss at the screen when I simply couldn’t figure out how how to proceed even though I thought I’d tried everything.
And though at its core there’s little difference between the approach required for the first level the approach required for the final one, there’s a noticeablly sharp increase in difficulty along the way. More often than not I’d blithely storm forward until I hit a dead end, then promptly switch to the other character and then repeat until hopefully, they’d wind up next to one other.
By the time I reached the final outer-space world, it was clear that that approach just wouldn’t cut it. Though ilomilo does a very good and patient job of teaching new elements as players progress, the dramatic changes that happen in the final world prove fairly confounding. Fortunately, whenever I hit a wall in those later sections, I could always just revisit all those earlier levels and try to find 100 percent of the collectables or give the leaderboards a run.
But really, there’s little to find fault with here. Simultaneously precious in aesthetics and grizzly in difficulty, drenched in color and bursting with a cotton-candy-colored soundtrack, ilomilo delivers on a simple concept and is well-paced enough not to overstay its welcome as it goes along.
