Help Cloudy Get Home And Gather Cheese Along The Way In A Cloudy Adventure
A Cloudy Adventure ($0.99) by Emmanuel Petti is a physics platformer with cute characters and tough-to-master gameplay.
Help! Cloudy, the adorable cloud protagonist of the game, has been maliciously kidnapped from the Cloud Kingdom by the evil Cheddar Bandits. Cloudy desperately needs your assistance to get him home and to recover the stolen Cheddar Reserves along the way.
Cloudy is controlled by his friends, Nim and Bus, who each blow Cloudy in different directions. Nim will blow Cloudy to the right, and Bus will blow him upwards. You can move Nim and Bus anywhere on the screen with just a finger, and often their skills must be used together to get Cloudy to the level’s end, marked with a red ball. Later in the game, you will unlock other characters with different abilities.
The goal in each level is to reach the bouncing ball, but along the way, you also need to try to collect all of the missing cheese wheels, which are marked with peeping bandits on the screen. There are three per level, and collecting more cheese results in, well, more cheese. However, there’s no collective score to keep track of.
Controlling two different characters to maneuver Cloudy around the screen is no easy task. If you accidentally blow Cloudy too far over on the right side of the screen he will get stuck and the level will have to be restarted. It’s easy to get Cloudy stuck in places, so it’s a good thing that the restart button is located on the top right of the screen for quick access.
A Cloudy Adventure tends to be a frustrating game, especially when Cloudy is inaccessible in the corner again and again. It’s definitely not a good game for people who are currently being treated for anger management problems or high blood pressure.
As the game progresses and you earn more and more cheese, you will begin to unlock various items that Cloudy can equip, such as a monocle. This is a fun aspect of the game, and one of the things that I enjoyed about it.
There are a total of 30 levels across three different areas, and while that doesn’t sound like much content, it takes awhile to go through, thanks to difficult controls and lots of hidden cheese to gather.
Compared to other physics based puzzlers, A Cloudy Adventure feels clunky and hard to play. Menus are not entirely intuitive and levels are slow to load. The music sounds almost static-like, which quickly got it turned off, and Cloudy makes possibly the most irritating sound effects of any game character ever when he is being blown about.
Despite these issues, I liked the characters and the concept. I just wish gameplay was more streamlined and accessible. Being able to blow Cloudy to the left of the screen would be a huge improvement.
If you like ultra hard physics puzzlers and have oodles of patience, then you may want to check out A Cloudy Adventure. It will definitely test your timing and ability to make minute changes in gameplay. After all, it’s just $0.99 and offers plenty of gameplay for that price.
