The NES metroidvania game Annalog has already been confirmed for a physical release via The Retro Room thanks to generous Kickstarter backing. With ten days left to go in its funding drive, Annalog will almost certainly hit the $20,000 goal, guaranteeing a release for the Nintendo Switch. And it may or may not get the last $5,000 needed to guarantee publication of a Gamefaqs style ASCII walkthrough. While mdsteele, the man behind Annalog, is a nights-and-weekend game developer, Annalog isn’t his first title to earn a physical release. That honor goes to BIG2SMALL, so I thought to review the indie title to offer a bit of a preview as to just how mdsteele’s new game is likely to play.
BIG2SMALL is not a metroidvania, of course, but rather a puzzle game. You play as Ellie the elephant, Giselle the goat, and Melanie the Mouse in a format I think can be best described as sliding ice puzzles. In each stage, you try to get the animals onto their favorite food. They will go forward until stopped, with obstacles changing depending on the specific animal. Each puzzle is a deceptively simple looking 10×9 board. Gradually, new restrictions and abilities are introduced to the animals until by the final board, there’s a puzzle that uses every single one of the game’s mechanics at once.
The game looking and reads very adorably, with simple dialog that sounds like something out of a snarky children’s book that clearly explains every new quirk to the gameplay. But don’t be fooled. BIG2SMALL requires some fairly incredible spatial reasoning skills in order to move forward. Despite the fact that at any given time only twelve moves (and usually not that many) are available to the player, as each animal can only move in four directions, each move greatly complicates the board such that if you can’t conceptualize what the screen will look like several moves ahead, you may quickly get hopelessly stuck.
The design of the puzzles in BIG2SMALL are such that it isn’t really possible to get stuck, although you do have the option to restart the puzzle in the original position whenever you like anyway. BIG2SMALL is quite well designed for play on real hardware in this regard. I can easily imagine someone taking out a Game Boy and playing through a puzzle or two while waiting for something. Only if they’re really good at these kinds of puzzles though. I’m definitely not, and while I eventually managed to force my way through most of the game, I had to give up on the last two and look up the online solutions.
Oh yeah, the online solutions. For now, the Annalog Gamefaqs style guide is just a dangling Kickstarter prize, but there’s a very real Gamefaqs guide for BIG2SMALL available right now. While this isn’t the most artistic looking piece of ASCII, it will answer any flabbergasted responses you might have upon seeing a puzzle that supposedly can be completed in thirteen moves, even though you simply cannot see any way to do so. Again, I’m bad at these puzzles, and I could only just barely limp to the end of regular gameplay by cheating. I expect anyone who’s good at them will find quite the formidable challenge trying to complete every puzzle on par, earning a modest little star next to the stage name.
What, in the end, does this bode for Annalog? I would say plenty of good! The design of the puzzles in BIG2SMALL are challenging and complex, requiring dozens of careful chess-like precision moves to pull off. Yet the game is quite fair and transparent in its explanation, and at no point did I feel like the difficulty was unfair, even if I certainly would have liked a hint or two every so often. Word to the wise, don’t interpret BIG2SMALL literally. The exact order you need to get the animals into place varies constantly, and mdsteele packs a lot of variety and even replayability into such a simple concept.
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