So last week I peer-pressured Edwin into buying Craftimals: Build to the Sun. I kinda feel like I owe him a dollar.
To be fair, I don’t really deserve all the credit. Craftimals dangles a carrot that seems to be just slightly outside the three-minute trial limit, and between my insistence that it could be reached and his own need to reach said carrot, we ended up playing Craftimals for the better part of the evening.
Now I had played the trial version of Craftimals long ago, but I wasn’t able to put down the 80 Microsoft Points required to access the full game. Quite literally too, at the time I had 40 points. I probably would have bought it otherwise. It’s probably okay that I didn’t too, because Craftimals is just a big ol’ time sink, and two players make it go slightly faster.
Well, two players make it go faster if the second player is contributing to the cause, anyway.
Craftimals: Build to the Sun is exactly what it sounds like. You play as a small, cubed animal -I chose the bear, obviously- and you make a tower of blocks up into the sky. There’s a vague promise that eventually you can build high enough to reach the sun, but how will you know for sure until you try it? The problem is that the game makes its best effort to make sure you take as long as possible to reach that goal.
At the outset of the game, you can carry three blocks at a time. Once you’ve placed those three blocks, you need to head back on over to the wheelbarrow at the bottom to refuel. After placing five or six blocks, you should be able to surpass a checkered banner that pumps up your block capacity to ten. It seems like things are going to get better as you go.
But no, as the checkpoints get farther and farther apart (eventually they’re spaced out evenly at 200-250 meters), you don’t just get upgrades that allow you to build higher without a trip to the wheelbarrow. No, the next few upgrades are hats and new block colours. While the block colours are fundamentally useless, I always loved getting the new hats. Plain ol’ bear went through many careers -General Bear, Formal Bear, Constable Bear, Sexy Nurse Bear, etc- until he finally settled on being Pirate Bear. Dressing up my bear in hats was probably the most genuine fun that Craftimals provided.
There are a few more useful upgrades though; eventually you can carry 20, 40, and 50 blocks at a time, but those are spaced out very, very far apart. You also get the ability to delete blocks, which is good because the Craftimals cannot move through the blocks in any direction. So if you placed blocks all around your Craftimal before you earned the deletion ability, you’d have effectively ended your game. Also there is a double-jump and a block distance enhancement. Obviously both help to build higher, faster.
The issue here is that you have to climb up to the top of the tower, build up what you can, then fall back down to the ground to collect more blocks. This is a very tedious process, because climbing and falling take a lot more time than building does. And once you get up high enough, the trip back down to Earth can take whole minutes. Edwin smoothed out the climbing process by filling in gaps in my tower, making it so I could just hold the jump button and the direction I needed to move. But there is no way to increase your falling speed.
SPOILER ALERT! When you reach the 5000m mark, you will in fact, find the sun. Touching the sun -which is the goal of the game- will burn up your poor Craftimal and return it to the Earth as a ghost. An adorable little ghost that can still wear the collection of hats. The screen turns black for a moment and says “Silly Craftimal, Trix are for kids you can’t touch the sun. Look what you did!” and then you’re a ghost. This is when the game truly “opens up” because the ghost has free movement and can move through blocks, but that that point you probably won’t ever want to play Craftimals again. The biggest slap in the face though, is that you get the 500-block carrying upgrade on the last checkpoint before the sun, which would have been a lot more useful about 4700m beforehand.
The XBLIG description suggests that you use the different coloured blocks to make pictures and designs, but really, there are better ways to stretch your creative muscles. I suppose you could make a fancy tower to the top instead of the obvious zigzag staicase, but it already takes like two hours of focused building to get up there when you’re doing it the easy way. I can’t imagine how much time you’d have to sink into the game if you did it all fancy-like. I can’t seem to shake the urge to build one long, elaborate elevator shaft up to the top though. I think Craftimals may have won.
All in all, you probably shouldn’t buy Craftimals: Build to the Sun. Yeah, it’ll keep you busy for a while, but so will locking yourself in a closet, and you wouldn’t do that, would you? Also, Craftimals hates you.
Also, I almost typed 1000 words about Craftimals. 917 if you want to be precise. I’m pretty sure it won.
(On a separate note, I’m writing a new article. It’s about 60% done and ~1800 words. Get your reading hats ready.)