Apple Arcade reviews: Sneaky Sasquatch, Pinball Wizard

Sneaky Sasquatch

If you want an endorsement, Sneaky Sasquatch is probably going to join Simon’s Cat as a game that I am going to play-through.

The game starts you off as a sasquatch living in a camping park with the Yogi Bear-like mission to avoid rangers and snatch some pic-a-nic baskets (prodded along by the need to keep a food meter up lest the day end prematurely for you). But it doesn’t take long for the game to open up with a new focus: A developer is going to replace the park with condos or something if nobody out-bids his offer on the land. While the Sasquatch still needs to eat, his mission expands into finding pieces of a treasure map scattered throughout the park in the hopes that the treasure is worth enough to buy the park and keep it as-is.

While the game is on a day/night cycle with a hard time limit of how much the sasquatch can do before heading back home to sleep (or passing out), there doesn’t seem to be a set deadline for finding the treasure. Which is just as well, because there’s a lot you can do both in and out of the park. The game is rather sandboxy. The Shenmue Sasquatch will often find sidequests to help out other animals, part-time jobs, minigames galore (up to and including skiing) and even some sims-like renovation and furnishing of the sasquatch’s shack. You’ll acquire tools that enable you to explore blocked off areas or simply be able to travel a little farther during the day.

As a one-finger game that is entirely movement, the controls get a bit wonky. While it’s very easy to convert the touch controls to a mouse, several parts that require a swipe don’t handle smoothly as a click-and-drag. And in all forms, the vehicle controls are best described as “aspirational.” It’s a fun title overall, but occasional frustrations with the controls do bog it down from time to time.

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Pinball Wizard

I’ve played a lot of classic and not-so-classic takes on pinball over the years (perhaps I should do a roundup of that someday…). Whether we’re talking about real-world boards like the incomparable Medieval Madness or the more versatile non-simulation video games, like Metroid Prime Pinball, there are two key elements that you need to hit: a sense of progression and the puzzle-like nature of a board.

The conceit of Pinball Wizard ablely delivers the sense of progression; the story has the protagonist wizard whose body gets used as a pinball (you could almost say it is a Pinball Wizard of some sort) in order to overcome the pinball-table-like defenses of a tower he must scale to save the world. Each floor of the tower provides a new, more complex or more challenging board. And as fantasy tropes often come with RPG elements, the sense of progression is also severed by the wizard gaining experience and learning new spells that allow the player to basically cheat every once in a while.

The floors of the tower are littered with several objects that fit the fantasy/RPG theme in place of traditional pinball table objects. Mushroom bumpers become caches of gold or healing potions (draining your wizard through the gutter results in HP damage rather than a lost ball). Drop targets become archery targets. And, of course, there are dutifully patrolling monsters for your wizard to bump into and off of. Pinball Wizard has the traditional target and combination-style puzzles to unlock bonuses, but there is also another layer to it. The wizard can only climb to the next board by discovering a hidden kay, claiming it, and then getting shot into the open door like it were a kickout hole or a ramp.

There’s a fair amount of skill needed to progress past the first few boards in this game. Level ups are slow in coming, and bumping into a monster without sufficient momentum will hurt your wizard more than it hurts the creatures. The flippers are relatively small, and require pixel-perfect precision or lucky timing to launch your wizard in an intended direction.

Overall, it’s well put together, with only balance issues keeping it from shining. The tower runs out of new floors too quickly for the better-skilled, and the level ups/spells come too slowly for the worse-skilled.