This review could be over quickly. It’s barely a game, 1/10, Bye. But that wouldn’t be fair. It’s Kooky is a game where you have to find things that don’t fit in a picture. The kind you can find on the back of a package of cereal aimed at children. It’s not much more than that. Here you have a big picture, find X things that don’t fit, go to the next picture. That’s exactly what the game sells itself as and that’s exactly what you get.
The game starts with an intuitive and cute tutorial that gives you some examples before the game starts. Then you get to play your way through picture after picture. The images then get bigger and more detailed and some of them have a time limit on them. However, the time limits are generous and should you fail, just try again as the picture is the same if you restart. You just need to click on the ones you already found last time again.
The pictures are drawn in a kind of deliberately ugly way that’s charming and most of them have some stuff that made me smile as I found them lightheartedly amusing. Even the things that stand out were many times blurry and made me giggle as I was quite tired playing the game. Many towards the end had something called Fridge Horror and seemed to be about children and cute animals getting hurt when you think about it. Which I personally thought was humorous as the style would fit in a children’s book.
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The music in the game is two, three ridiculous songs on repeat, one of which was an overused song on the internet which annoyed me. The in-game menus were also quite clunky on the Xbox. You could only use the left joystick and often you went too far. Using the crosshairs would have been preferable.
Thought the game was short and easy. I managed everything that could be done late at night and despite being tired I found everything on almost the first try every time despite time limits. I think it was a good thing that everything was fairly easy to find, because otherwise you would probably get really annoyed when you’re looking for the last thing. But if the game is too hard there was also a hint system that told you about the next thing to find if you found lights, however the system was a bit unclear if the lights were only for the same image or if you could save them for the next image as well. In the worst case, you could also just pause the game to take your time as the timer stopped then.
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My highlight with the game was probably not intended that way, but it was very meditative. Just sitting and looking at a picture for a long time but putting all the focus on it cleared the brain and you were in a kind of trance. With this, more philosophical thoughts about art began to emerge.
When you are at museums and exhibitions, you look at paintings for just a few seconds and move on. This despite the fact that the paintings are painted by people who may have lived several hundred years ago and are crammed with details. In our society we cannot manage to give time to art but have to move on to the next painting, the next painting. An exhibition of 30 paintings can be finished in a quarter of an hour, even though each painting may have years of work behind it and deserves hours of attention.
When It’s Kooky forced me to look at the same picture for a long time, many such thoughts went through my head. In detail I got to go through what each badly drawn boy and girl was doing and noticed attention to detail and the overall picture. I think the time limits could have been dropped so I could have spent more time taking in the shots.
In summary it gets 5/10. Not good, not bad. Simply mediocre. Maybe this game would be extra good to play with someone else and find the things together, for example with a smaller child or with an elderly grandmother?
The game is like ordering a healthy and tasteless salad. Don’t be disappointed that it lacks sauce and has too little meat, it was exactly the kind of salad you ordered.
