A Wish Upon a Star
Patchy puzzles in A Wish Upon A Star.
Ithink it was level two where I swore at the screen and quit to the desktop in this (otherwise lovely) puzzle game, and that usually doesn’t happen until, at least, the fifth or sixth stage. It was only by reading about the game online that I would later learn what I had missed: a tiny, yet vital, platform almost completely obscured from sight.
A Wish’s central system sees you raising and lowering the game’s many platforms, in order to create pathways leading from each stage’s entrance to the exit. Unfortunately, Wish throws you straight in at the deep end, requiring what seem like advanced tactics nearly immediately.
To circle back to that missing platform, it’s never inferred that the game is going to hide such things from you. The platform in question is secreted behind several others,
Arequiring a good deal of raising and lowering, and frequent camera rotation to locate the bloody thing. After stage two, A Wish gets much easier, then suddenly much harder— the difficulty is all over the place.
I do think it’s worth a try for fans of slow-paced puzzle games regardless, and it helps that it’s astonishingly pretty. The isometric world is not just pleasant to look at, it’s fun to interact with, the animation and sound effects really selling the tactile nature of the colorful environments you find yourself in. Having said that, it’s not a hugely inventive puzzler, lacking the ‘holy shit’ factor present in classics like Portal or The Witness, but then surely there’s room in this world for something that’s pretty good. Persist through its wonky difficulty, and you’ll find a pretty good—not great— puzzler here.
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