Square Meal - Game Review

Square Meal is a 2D computer game that can be played as either one or multiplayer. Games are an activity, they have rules, conflicts, goals and often involve decision making and puzzle solving skills for the player. Square Meal is a relatively simple cell shaded 2D pixel art game, with charming avatars that looked adorably cute as they proceed to devour everything within sight. The aim of the game being to eat all the enemies within each level and continue progressing through harder and harder environments and monsters until finally finishing all the levels within the game. I will be evaluating the space, goals, components, mechanics and the overall rules of Square Meal to determine whether or not it is a successful system.

Space

The look and the feel of Square Meal is very simple and cute, typical of most pixel art styled games found on the Nitrome Games platform. The environments of the levels are all dungeon-esq styled, made of rock wall barriers/walls with fiery torches and simple, block by block grid structure. The lighting is dark to reinforce the dungeon aesthetic. It is displayed in a bird’s eye view, further reinforcing the grid like style to all of the game. Many of the levels also look reminiscent of a typical maze structure, within which the monster characters run through to find and eat enemies. The colour scheme consists mainly of dark greens and greys, typical rock, concrete colours, making the monsters, food and enemies stand out starkly against the environments.

Goals

To win the game the player has to eat all of the enemies within the level. Interestingly, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t collected all of the food items (used as a system for point scoring, as well as actually eating the enemies) the next level will commence as soon as the last enemy in the level is eaten. That is the only way to win, there aren’t any quantifiable outcomes. The structure of the levels is very simple, complete one, move onto the next, as they gradually become more difficult with increased numbers of monsters and less weapons to kill them with.

In multiplayer, interestingly, it doesn’t matter if one player dies, the other continues on and both characters are revived in the next level. But strangely, I don’t know whether this game is trying to promote, or discourage teamwork, as it is possible to kill your partner using the same weapons you use to kill enemies and eat them. Also with the point scoring system, Player 1 and Player 2’s points are grouped together, there is no encouragement or motivation to pit the scores against one another at the end of every level, the points seem to be there merely as a prop rather than for any actual serviceable purposes to the outcome of the game or your ‘final score’ at the end of each level.

Components

The two main characters that you can play in multiplayer are the green and blue monsters. The enemies are also monsters, and are distinguished from each other by their physical appearance. This makes it easier for the players to identify what type of enemy they are pursuing and what skills specific to that enemy it can use to attack back at the player.

Other components in the game include movable cubes of either rock, metal or wood which the players can use to attack and kill the enemies. They do this by ‘eating’ the cube, and then spitting it out at the enemies which are momentarily knocked out by the blow, in that time of roughly 6 seconds the enemy is defenceless and the player can quickly ‘eat’ the enemy, killing it. The components for this game are pretty simple and straight forward which is nice, it’s not a particularly confusing game to play.

Mechanics

The mechanics of this game consist mainly in the monster characters’ tongue. It is what it uses to grab and swallow food (for points), cubes (as weapons) and disorientated enemies (to eat and kill them). The monster characters have no arms, so their tongue, inspired heavily by a frog or chameleon tongue, is all it can use to pick up and grab things or defend or attack.

Rules

Specifically, in regard to the tongue, it can only extend a certain distance of one floor square/cube. This means that you have to stay in a relatively close range with the enemies. This makes the game slightly more difficult, because any contact with the enemies results in the players’ death. The character can only have one object in its mouth at a time. You can only kill an enemy by eating it. To pass a level all enemies must be killed. Eating the food or enemies results in points.

Each category of enemy has a specific set of rules that they have to follow in the directions/ pathways in which they move and the speed at which they do it.

Conclusion

Square Meal is an incredibly simple game which I feel would be aimed at a young market of players. The controls, level of difficulty and simple environments all create an aesthetically cute and pleasing game that is easy to pick up quickly and not very challenging to progress through. It’s perfect for a short attention span, and low level of brain activity. This is something I would play as a small distraction from assignments/ projects because it’s easy to leave and come back to without much thought. The character designs for both the players and the enemies are cute and the background music adds a fun quirky atmosphere. I would recommend this game for early teens who are trying to avoid studying for a few hours.

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