Capsule Review: MonsterBag
A weird little puzzle game where you play as a… monster… bag… thing and try to catch up to the girl who is your friend and/or owner. You do this by hopping from person to person while remaining undetected - get seen and you fail and are kicked back to your last “checkpoint” hop. The checkpoints feel arbitrary, as do the people who can see you, and some folks have arbitrary barriers as well - for example, for some reason you apparently can’t hop to someone who’s really into the music they’re listening to. You get past these barriers by using the touchscreen to have weird arbitrary effects on the environment or throw objects at people. Apparently you’re telekinetic? At least for certain arbitrary objects. The puzzles felt contrived and constrained, such that they weren’t satisfying to complete and I didn’t feel like I was solving them so much as finding the hoop the game wanted me to jump through. There also wasn’t enough characterization of either the bag or the girl for me to care enough about reuniting them to motivate me to slog through the puzzles, so I put the game down pretty quickly.
I Stopped Playing When: After a couple of puzzles I felt no connection to the characters and no satisfaction from trying to progress by reading the developer’s mind.
One Star: Not for me. While there might be someone out there who'd enjoy this game, I was actively repulsed by it or just found nothing to latch on to.