PixlBit

My, that’s a polished turd!

Beautiful aesthetics, wonderful music, and just about perfect controls are all you could hope for in a platformer save one very important factor and this eluded me for a while.  I couldn’t figure out with so many great things going on in Pid why I hated it so very deeply.  Eventually I realized that its well-crafted elements were completely overwhelmed by the boring, mediocre, and at times maddening level design.  It’s a shame that the designers primarily focused on the window dressing bits instead of considering all the things you would actually be doing when you play.  Pid struggles with knowing what sort of levels it wants to present, switching from puzzles to difficult platforming to stealth to long periods of just waiting around or running in a straight line.  Each of these disparate level types (and more) are middling at best on their own and when combined are a complete drag.  Pid’s wonderful presentation can’t save it from the tedium packed into every single minute of its tortuous length.

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This time Big Ben is missing.

The Big Ben Burglary is the second case in the ongoing episodic production of Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math. As such, it features the same Professor Layton inspired gameplay from the The Lady Liberty Larceny, with the exception that the puzzles are more rooted in mathematics than general puzzle solving. This makes for a quest that's a bit duller than the first, in addition to being even briefer.

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