Bliss Island
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PSP
| Bliss Island

Odd things happen on islands. Just ask Dr Moreau. Or watch an episode of creepy '80s TV drama series Fantasy Island. Or, perhaps more obvious, look no further than Lost.

Even Bliss Island, which sounds idyllic, is buffeted by some worrying undercurrents. All is not as it should be, meaning you – as Hoshi the Zwooph (a fluffy creature with a long, air-blowing trunk, don't you know?) – and your friends have to engage in a series of nine mini-games to put things right.

These games involve such varied tasks as saving flowers from pesky aphids by reaching them first; leaping about the troposphere collecting stars from one (often moving) pole to the next; or blowing your way up the screen from one platform to the next until you reach the exit.

The above three examples work reasonably well (the physics on the latter seem to have been improved since we tried out preview code).

But they're not as convincing as the games involving the blowing of fruit into the gigantic mouth of a hungry and demanding monster by correctly working out the firing angle or, better still, the billiards based option, which gives you three shots to connect any two balls of the same colour (at which point the counter resets and the balls in question disappear), with the aim of clearing the baize.

In fact, Boulder Billiards is possibly the most enjoyable game on offer here.

Less convincing, unfortunately, is the top-down mayhem of the only racing-based entry – in no small part due to the restrictive nature of the tracks, which makes a fluid experience impossible. Similarly claustrophobic is a mini-game involving the sequential destruction of descending blocks by blowing a ball around – you can't help feeling a bigger screen (or, more realistically, smaller graphics) would significantly improve things, particularly once you get onto the higher difficulty levels.

Ah, yes, the difficulty levels. Divided into bronze, silver and gold, the difficulty curve has a tendency to occasionally spike to such a degree that the player risks getting skewered.

Naturally, most of the games increase the number of obstacles in your way to make life trickier and it's inevitable some will find certain types of games more difficult than others.

Still, many players will be frustrated by the way Cave Adventure, for instance, turns from a docile feline of a game involving the negotiation of a side-scrolling course while collecting gems and occasionally topping up your 'puff meter', into a ferocious tiger requiring the added complexity of avoiding a selection of instant death-delivering hazards. And that's just on silver – by the time you attempt it on gold it's further evolved into a creature of such cruelty there simply is no Earth-bound simile available.

And yet, anyone with a competitive streak in them is unlikely to accept defeat and is therefore likely to come back to Bliss Island for another five- or ten-minute blast.

That's arguably how the game intends to be played. Even the less convincing mini-games achieve some draw on a player (though you could argue that as they have to be beaten in order to reach some of the better examples in Adventure mode they are in effect just an obstacle to be cleared) and once cleared they appear in Challenge mode as single entities, meaning you can skip the weaker offerings.

Sure, it's short-lived, unashamedly repetitive, the brash visuals won't be to everyone's taste (although we suspect younger players are unlikely to complain), and the game dynamic is often horribly simplistic, with controls to match. But just as, say, snobby musicians will sneer at technically simple music, as though beneath them, the reality is complexity is no indication of quality.

That's not to say this is brilliant for being uncomplicated – far from it. But equally, it would be unfair to criticise its straightforward nature as a result of being a casual game.

By bravely wading out into a vastly under-represented genre for the PSP, Bliss Island will no doubt find itself quickly encircled by the sharks of the hardcore gaming community eager to tear a bite out of PomPom's creation. It's an easy prey and an ultimately pointless attack because they won't like it – it hasn't been designed for their palate.

If you take that into consideration, along with the game's failings (namely the inconsistent difficulty curve and two or three blemished mini-games), the ability to single out mini-games in Challenge mode, and its reduced price point, then Bliss Island starts to make a hell of a lot more sense than Lost's plot, at least.

Bliss Island

It won't last forever and is far from perfect, but anyone – particularly youngsters – looking for occasional casual gaming kicks will find fun here
Score
Joao Diniz Sanches
Joao Diniz Sanches
With three boys under the age of 10, former Edge editor Joao has given up his dream of making it to F1 and instead spends his time being shot at with Nerf darts. When in work mode, he looks after editorial projects associated with the Pocket Gamer and Steel Media brands.