I recently finished Ibb and Obb with my friend John as part of our regular Saturday morning gaming.  This one kind of came out of nowhere for me, as it’s hard to decode anything about the name.  It really delivers on the 2D puzzle-platforming genre though, and the two player cooperative element is really well polished.

A bit more about the good and bad of this one after the jump.

While it may seem obvious, my favorite part of this game was the cooperative puzzles.  The sort of puzzle-box logic to figure out how to get both Ibb and Obb past a puzzle and capture the gems was really fun for me.  I also really like how it played with gravity to give those puzzles a unique feel – sure, once we got used to it, it wasn’t so much of a mind-bender any more, but it was always present in the solutions, which was pretty cool.

In terms of the platforming, Ibb and Obb was a little less interesting to me.  I tend to prefer that when I’ve solved a puzzle (i.e. figured out the sequence of moves to unlock the lock), doing so shouldn’t be terribly difficult.  Ibb and Obb though demanded that even when you had the key to the puzzle, you still also needed crack timing and expert platforming to pull it off.  There was more than one case of John and I knowing what needed to be done to solve a particular puzzle, only to spend a half-hour or more on the execution.  This felt more frustrating than challenging, and made the later levels less fun overall.

In thinking about this from a game design point of view, more than once I found myself asking why they didn’t simply make the puzzles more challenging rather than ratcheting up the platforming difficulty.  I think there’s been a pull away from this in the modern era simply because of the internet – you can look up the solution to a puzzle, but you can’t look up better platforming skills – it’s a bit of a shame if this is guiding game development in that direction, as I’d certainly rather have more clever puzzles than more difficult platforming.

The monsters felt both good and bad at different times in this game.  On the one hand, I really liked how you had to be on both sides of the monster to kill it and get the gems.  This mechanic drove a lot of the puzzle to get to both sides of the monsters to make the kill.  However, as the primary way to get gems in a level, it drove a lot of the platforming challenge that I talked about above.  Also, if you accidentally killed a monster and were unable to get the gems (either because someone died or because no one was on the right side to pick them up), those gems were effectively lost, even if the monster respawned.  This caused another bit of asymmetry between the puzzle element and the platforming element – you could retry the puzzles as many times as needed to figure them out, but once a monster was dead, there was no way to retry to do it better (and get those points).

Overall, I really liked Ibb and Obb, as it was an impressive puzzle platformer.  While I felt like the platforming part was a little frustrating than challenging, others’ tastes may vary, so I would still very much recommend it.  My only warning is that this game is strictly two player – so I would recommend only getting it if you have a partner who is as excited about the game as you are (otherwise, it will sit in your steam library not getting played).