Welcome to our review of Pode, a cute but fiendishly hard puzzle game.
Pode is the story of a little rock helping a fallen star find its way home. As they travel through the insides of a mysterious and magical mountain, Bulder and Glo breathe life into an ancient sleeping world and explore the ruins of a long lost civilization with their unique talents and abilities. Only by helping each other can these unlikely adventure companions solve the ancient puzzles that open the secret passageways up the caverns of Mount Fjellheim. Pode is a co-op puzzle exploration game built around the themes of friendship and cooperation, with a strong emphasis on positive actions, relaxing atmosphere and beautiful art inspired by Norwegian culture.
As you start your gameplay, you got 2 basic ways to act. You walk around trying to get to the next room, While it sounds easy, Pode will make you scratch your head more than once. I played some screens in co-op with my wife, who is not really a gamer, but she does occasionally dabble in some minor gaming.
As the star, you create plant life or influence those same plants and as the rock, you influence the rocks. Pode blends two simplistic playing styles together and while it is charming, it can get very hard as the tutorial is rather limited. The later levels might even be called very obscure, but that is not really an issue for me.
While playing, I mostly had a feeling of “I need to get there, but how do I do this?”. Basically the entire time Pode delivered on its premise of providing a puzzle game that is different from the rest. At one of the earliest levels, You had to walk around as the star, create jump up plateaus with your plants and use that to go to the next level. You literally have no idea you can do that aside from a very small mark on the screen telling you to hit the ZR button.
Once you hit that button, a very nicely animated plant sprouts and created a jumping pad to go up and above. It is a simplistic way to solve a puzzle, but imagine having to combine this mechanic with the rock, who has little warp holes in the background. He suddenly climbs higher and how do you take your star…
I usually do not post spoilers, but I will make an exception and I will let you know how to do it. You jump back down with the rock and he becomes your stepping stone for the star to jump up. It truly is ingenious as it stretches the way you think. It is never really just straight forward. You analyse the level, you try a few times and hopefully succeed. If not, try again and again.
Graphically, this game is not that special, though I must say it mixes well with this kind of puzzle game, though I could easily see an alternate setting being as fun as the original.
In conclusion, this game is actually much more fun than you’d imagine, the sole downside being its price point, which is rather steep at 25… Despite that, I would still tend to recommend the game if you are on the market for a chill and relaxing through your brain might disagree when hitting that one level that just does not make sense…
My rating, everything considered, is sadly only 70%, the price point is what hurts here and having been released at a time with indie darling Hollow Knight or Fortnite, it might get lost in the shuffle at this price.
