Adventure, romance and seating Arrangements. This is the story of Girls like Robots. As you progress from level to level you’ll encounter many varying environments where your oddly specific powers of seating arrangement will have to be utilised. Starting at school you’ll work your way through to a volcano, the countryside, and even to outer space.
The aesthetics are nothing short of Charming. Everyone in this universe takes on the form of a cube-shaped faces. The characters and backgrounds are all drawn in a delightfully cartoon fashion. As you move and place your little friends their eyes will follow your mouse and their expressions change to fit how they feel about their current seat placement. The whole game really just has this light-hearted brilliance to it, which is addictive. The soundtrack for the game is performed entirely by the Peacemeal String Band, and what a soundtrack it is. The levels and cutscenes are all accompanied by the most upbeat, jolly string pieces I’ve personally ever heard.
The gameplay is very simple, you are given a grid to seat a variety of little cube characters, each character has preferences as to whom they wish to sit next to. You gain happiness for each compatible adjacent seated character and your goal is to reach a certain value. The happiness goes down if you put characters that don’t get along together. The game scales up in complexity as you go, to include all manner of different characters and obstacles, each with varying preferences and quirks. The game includes a variety of mini-games with different play styles & objectives as you progress through the story, these mix up the pace of the game and help it from getting stale.
Between each set of levels is a little cutscene featuring the cube characters as they go on an adventure to various locations with reckless abandonment for their safety. While amusing the animation is hardly more than blocks bopping up and down, which is not to say it is bad. Being a simple, light-hearted puzzle game the animation is about what you would expect. While the in game reactions and expressions from your blocks really make the pieces seem alive.
Even though the game is a lot of fun it lacks in replay value. As I progressed, I kept attempting each puzzle until I got 100% each time, this meant after I had finished I was left with nothing more to do. As the puzzles and mini-games don’t change, the biggest replay feature is the ability to go back and play older levels to better your previous score, but unless you’re the type of gamer that likes to perfect your score, there’s not much incentive to draw you back
Overall Girls like Robots is a definite play. The game is cheap, beautifully polished, and a great laugh. If you enjoy puzzle games you will find a lot of enjoyment here. The game is available now for Windows, MAC, and Linux on Steam as well as iOS.
