Game Reviews

Oh Hi! Octopi!

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iOS
| Oh Hi! Octopi!
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Oh Hi! Octopi!
|
iOS
| Oh Hi! Octopi!

Let me get one thing clear: I don't fully grasp the rules of Oh Hi! Octopi. The game is not what you might call self-explanatory, and the breezy tutorial isn't exactly enlightening, either.

When playing this game, I'm often left staring at my iPod, feeling confused, and bewildered, like a Neolithic caveman who's just found, well, an iPod.

Here's how it works, as far as I can tell. An unlimited stream of coloured octopi pop out of a window in the centre of the screen. They slowly march through the level, but you can momentarily stun and shove them with a whack of your mallet.

There's a big button at the top of the screen, and if you slug it with your hammer a coloured paintball appears. Knock this into an octopus of the same colour and the cephalopod will kick the bucket and fall off the screen.

Easy as octo-pie

Here's the kicker: as it drops down the screen, it takes out any same-coloured octopi in its path - and you score a big fat bonus.

That's your strategy, then. Setting up these complicated chain reaction situations where one felled yellow octopus will take out a procession of other yellow squid-things beneath it.

That's easier said than done, of course. It's extremely difficult to manually move an octopus. The creatures move at a truly glacial pace, the paintballs are unpredictable bouncy balls, and the octopi never quite fall in the way you want them to.

Setting up a decent chain reaction in Oh Hi! Octopi! is a slow and thankless task, and with all the moving parts and unpredictable variables it feels like setting up a row of toppling dominoes on the wing of a moving Airbus.

Oh bye! Octopi!

It's a tedious game, and one that belies the cutesy visuals and the single-screen arcade-style level layout, which looks like Bubble Bobble or Super Crate Box. While we're here, its also worth mentioning that the two-button controls are too basic for their own good, and the horrid music quite literally gave me a headache.

I probably don't fully grasp the intricacies of Oh Hi! Octopi! You probably won't, either. In a different game, this obliqueness might have translated into depth and complexity, but Oh Hi! Octopi! sadly gets too much wrong for its obliqueness to be anything other than an added irritation.

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Oh Hi! Octopi!

It might be cute, but Oh Hi! Octopi is tedious, finicky, and almost entirely incomprehensible
Score
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer