Cute Dodos, liquid physics and more from Neko Entertainment
Don’t even ask me how I wound up on the homepage of a DSiWare game, just look at this explosion of cuteness! Happy dodo wearing glasses, giddy stack of eggs, a Red Cross stylus (ahh! It’s not real), a Crash Test Dummy egg, and a whole slew of animals yearning to eat a clueless dodo egg. How do the eggs even get faces? Seems like they’re happy enough just being eggs to even bother hatching. The game itself is a cute but familiar 2D physics puzzler but it led me down a hole to developer, Neko Entertainment‘s site.
Their main page has a little animation of a puddle flying across the frame and that kind of physics puzzler I’m still not burnt out on. Simply titled Puddle, it’s labeled as a Work in Progress for Xbox Live Arcade but is available as a free download for PC which I just grabbed. A handful of levels see you simply rotating left and right to move some impressively generated liquids through puzzles. Of particular note is the stage that looks like mercury moving through the human body, complete with black and white X-ray view and beating organs. Very slick, I hope it gets expanded upon and brought to XBLA as a full-fledged game soon!
Neko’s also got a new Wii game out now in Europe called Western Heroes that tweaks all the right memories of Wild Guns from the SNES and Sunset Riders. A cel shaded-esque steampunk western, it has two things going for it. One, the art style is kinda neat; colorful and bright. Two, it comes with a plastic repeater rifle you shove your Wii Remote and Nunchuk into and manually cock to reload. The downside? It’s an on-rails lightgun shooter. Not the most promising but I like how they’ve run with it!
Sure, they’ve done a lot of Wii and DSiWare games I’ve glanced past but there’s some serious spunk at Neko Entertainment. I like their style and am looking forward to seeing what this mysterious “AAA” 3DS title they’re working on turns out to be.
