Game Reviews

Boy Loves Girl

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iOS
| Boy Loves Girl
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Boy Loves Girl
|
iOS
| Boy Loves Girl

In spite of what its title might suggest, Boy Loves Girl isn't a game about love. It's a game about obsession. It's a game about the frankly ludicrous lengths we'll go to to make members of the opposite sex pay attention to us.

More than that, it's about the obsessive nature of smartphone gaming. It offers you a choice between a simple life and one fraught with danger.

You can take the easy road, but you'll always know that those points you crave were within your grasp and you were too scared to try and get them.

Moon on a string

Playing as the Boy, it's your job to drag the moon from one end of a level to the other. Luckily, the moon is attached to a piece of string, allowing you to weave it between lethal clouds and use it to collect yellow smiling faces.

You also need to catch up with either the Girl, who's running away from you, or one of the animals you're trying to ensnare in order to make the Girl notice you.

You control the moon by swiping up and down on the screen, avoiding the different types of cloud that are out to thwart you. Sleepy clouds knock you out with their snores, storm clouds hit you with bolts of lightning, and rocket clouds race at you with violent intent.

Cloud gaming

Staying out of the way of the clouds is a reasonably simple affair, and if that's the way you choose to play you'll breeze through the game. However, each level also offers up a set of three challenges.

These challenges involve dealing with your meteorological assailants in specific ways. You need to dodge rocket clouds at the very last second, float over sleepy clouds and their rising Zs, and triple-tap on storm clouds to make them explode. Performing these acts showers you with smiley faces, which you need in order to succeed.

Rain and bomb clouds are thrown into the mix too, and pretty soon what should be a sedate amble after a goat becomes a nightmare of reflex and dexterity as you try and complete all the challenges you've been given.

Love's labour's won

Boy Loves Girl is a unique and, at times, trying little game. Randomly generated levels mean you can't just learn patterns to succeed, and the simple tasks it gives you are soon tangled together into a tightly wound knot.

Of course, you could ignore the challenges, sedately swinging the moon into accessible gaps, and collecting the animals you need to make the Girl love you.

But Boy Loves Girl knows that you can't do that. It knows that those few lines of text that spell out the challenges at the start of each of the 50 or so levels are like a red rag to an iPhone-carrying bull.

You might not fall in love with the game, but the way it gently ensnares your brain will make sure that you follow it through to the bitter end.

Boy Loves Girl

A cartoon-style romance full of silliness, Boy Loves Girl hides a fiendishly addictive game under a simple premise, then dares you to escape its obsessive trials
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.