Odd Dorable

I love the art direction in the game. It's an incredibly cute and adorable experience. I hate to be the one to break the 100% positive streak. Here goes... Odd Dorable is a walking simulator. You walk around in a hand drawn, cute and adorable land to find candy. Some interactions have been recorded by a kid which is awesome. There's some ultra light puzzling going on. The quality of life in the game is awful. I played on a gamepad. There's no native gamepad support. The game adds an unconfigurable deadzone. I set my deadzone 0 in Steam and I expect games to honor it, or make it configurable, as it completely kills the feeling of controlling your character. There's no run toggle, so you have to continuously hold down the L2. There's no in-game menu and I can't control the Steam overlay meaning I can't exit the game. I see the dev advertising (on the forum) the game has Steam Deck support, which it probably has since that device has a mousepad. Most gamepads do not. There's no direction in the game. There's nothing setting the context. It took me 15 minutes to figure out that there even is an objective in the game. I almost quit thinking "Oh, so it's literally just a walking simulator". By coincidence, after checking out the Steam achievements, that's when I found out there's an objective. The trees keep flickering. It switches between two different models and I don't like it at all. This game should have spend some more time in the oven. It badly needs quality of life fixes: - Native gamepad support - Introduction, set the context - Performance improvements - In-game menu I know it's a short game, but personally I would've preferred a saving and loading feature. The game is fully playable with a gamepad but the game badly needs a quality of life pass. It will help shift the focus from annoying to actually enjoying a cute and Odd Dorable world.

I believe I got this game on a sale that some time ago, and I found this game to be a cute and pleasant walking sim with cute hand drawn graphics. I've never played anything exactly like it. A unique art style for sure. It's on the short side, as I 100% the achievements in a little over an hour. But the puzzles were fun and the sights were pleasant, so I recommend it.

Sweet Candy This game is an odd one to reflect on. Certainly, using a child's drawing to bring a video game world to life and to let the player experience its silliness is a unique thing to do. I really did hope to come here and unleash words of praise and positivity, but personally I left with some mixed feelings. The game is all right at best. Let's put aside the unique major selling point of having a child's vision of the world set as the art style and just talk about what the game has to offer and who it might sell itself to. If I had to come up with a similar type of game, I would consider the Mario games. Let's say my favourite classic of all time, Super Mario 64. Odd Dorable is the simplified version of one single game world in Super Mario 64, just to give you an idea of what this game demands in terms of puzzle logic and world exploration. It is fun to walk through the peaceful and colourful world. I really enjoyed the a cappella SFX and the child's voice used to give the NPCs and animals some sound to communicate back to you. Perhaps that is the best part: to walk to every place once and take in the sound and the visuals. The walking speed in this game is rather slow, and the sprint felt inconsistent at times. It was slower at the beginning and gained more and more sprint speed throughout the game, but never increased at the same point in both of my playthroughs. It could have been fast from the very beginning. Other than that, the puzzles are easy enough, finding sweet candy for the princess is easy enough, and there are some secrets and Easter eggs to discover. All of that alone would suffice for the short length of the game, if it weren't for the poor performance, the invisible walls and the bugs. The game runs poorly. I would assume that the large number of overlapping 2D textures makes rendering go crazy. Depending on positioning and viewing angle, the FPS count drops down to 10–15 FPS, leading to small input delays and stuttering. In addition, I had to restart the game once after encountering a bug in which one sweet candy didn't spawn after I had solved the appropriate puzzle. I am uncertain what caused it, as I recreated my steps in the second playthrough and managed to acquire the candy that time. It was a bummer to restart, since the game doesn't have a save feature. Something else that makes exploration a little less fun is the number of invisible walls and hitboxes. Of course the world has boundaries, but some objects, like trees, seem to have a bigger hitbox than the texture itself. Sometimes I bumped into things I couldn't see and had to move around them. It's not terribly annoying, but each time it breaks the immersion a little. Overall, the game is, as said before, all right. I came with the expectation of playing a short, unique game, and I did. It wasn't as exciting as I had perhaps hoped. After all, it felt like this game wasn't really made for us players. I mean, a game like this clearly attracts collectors, achievement hunters and enjoyers of the more unusual types of games. But all of those miss the one purpose this game finds itself in. To use a child's art to tell a story is to preserve it. Perhaps it is a love letter to a very special someone who will one day look back on it and get to rejoice in a range of hopefully memorable emotions about a loving father and a young daughter. The game is not made for us, it's made for her, and we just got the privilege of being part of it. And that's what I think is best about this game.