If you’ve played a mobile game in the past few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve been hit by adverts, and there are two categories of those adverts that are relevant to this review. There are adverts for games that give you gold pins to pull out, causing water or lava to flow in the right direction, and there are games that give you dramatic choices. Who do you save? Which person is the crook?
What connects these two advert types is that their games never existed. They were ploys by marketing departments to hook you into downloading a game that was something else entirely (Gardenscapes and Evony were two of the biggest grifters in this department, although Gardenscapes have since added these puzzles in). We live in a fascinating world where marketing standards don’t exist, and games are free to promote a game that isn’t actually the one you’re getting.
Where are we going with this? Well, having been exposed to these adverts, players have started to actually want these fictional games. Which has led to a scramble to make them. This is where Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles comes in. Now, we don’t know, one-hundred percent, whether Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles was created in direct reaction to these adverts, but it does look an awful lot like them. It satisfies the growing need to play them.
So what are the Riddles and Puzzles? What you’re getting is a predicament, presented to you by a ‘Trailer Guy’ voice. Perhaps you are being chased by zombies with some werewolves in front of you. Or maybe the situation is more prosaic, with a knife being stolen and three possible suspects. The question is laid out – often as simple as ‘which one do you pick?’ – and a timer ticks down. You choose one and wait for the timer to resolve. Then Trailer Guy reveals which one he considers to be correct.
You get a tick or a cross and then it’s onto the next question, before getting a total score at the end of the run. Scenarios are often elastic-banded together with other, similar scenarios to form a category. You can try to identify ‘Which Person is Poor?’, or you can try ‘Jungle Survival’, ‘Spot the Criminal’ or ‘Who is Careless?’.
Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles is flipping huge. There are twenty-eight categories in total, with an average of ten questions in each, which is unexpectedly massive. Through the power of mental arithmetic, we believe there is five hours of content here, and that’s only if you go through each question once.
Considering that this can be played cooperatively, with four players all offering their take on each situation, you might want to play for longer than that five hours (note to developers QubicGames: we would have loved smartphone support). There are achievements for getting 75% of the questions right in a given category, and that’s a red flag to our bull. We couldn’t help but replay a bunch of Riddles and Puzzles, just to get that satisfying bloop. What we’re trying to say is that, for a measly £6.69, you’re getting an awful lot of game, particularly as it’s so replayable.
But a game like this is only as good as its questions, and it’s here where Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles stumbles. How better to communicate the problem than tossing out some of the riddles ourselves?
Okay, there are three doors in front of you, and you have to choose one. Door A opens and shuts faster than your ability to step through. Door B contains a tiger, and it hasn’t eaten for a day. Door C has a venomous snake. Which do you choose?
We chose Door A, assuming that rocks in the area could be used to make a doorstop. But no, the answer was Door B. The reason? A tiger can survive for two weeks without eating, and it ate only a day ago. If you’re arching an eyebrow as much as we are, then we’re in a similar boat: we ain’t stepping into a room with a tiger, no matter how long ago it ate. Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles has an eccentric take on logic that verges on the nonsensical.
You want more? In front of you is Parent A, who is cycling with a child, and neither of them have a helmet on. Parent B is in a car with a child, and neither has a seatbelt on. Which one is the bad parent? Now, we were taken aback for a few seconds, and ultimately chose Parent A. None of them are going to win Dad of the Year awards, but we chose the bike for the largely arbitrary reason that a car has airbags. The answer? Parent B, because the kid isn’t wearing a seatbelt. Cue chucking pads into walls.
We’d say that roughly half of the riddles and puzzles in the collection lead to an eyeroll, sigh, huff or fit of rage. We began lumping its inadequacies into categories, there were so many of them. Even on a Series X|S, the image quality was so low that we couldn’t see the slightly different coloured clues. Other times, Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles just decided arbitrarily which of two wrongs was the most right. Another category of issue is complete fabrications: to get out of a prison, you supposedly should push a brick, because it’s a secret exit. A secret exit. In a prison. In broad daylight. We smashed another gamepad.
You want more? Of course you do. We chose a path with poisonous bees, because ‘poisonous’ means that they only hurt if you eat them, right? ‘Venomous’ would be more of a problem. But NO, on this occasion Bright Side wasn’t being a Smart Alec, and we were wrong.
Should we drive above the speed limit OR with stacked boxes in our car? Stacked boxes, right? NO! Going above the speed limit is less dangerous, because REASONS.
Which is more irresponsible?: grilling in the sun, or letting go of balloons? IT’S GRILLING IN THE SUN. Why? WE DON’T KNOW!!
And breathe. We’re sorry, this is the state it puts us in. It’s not our fault. Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles made us do it.
Each time we play, we carry a desperate hope that, this time, the question will form some kind of logical, coherent argument. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. The result is a complete lack of confidence in the creators of Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles. There might be a run of clever questions where the clue is evident if you listen to the question carefully, or spot the vital clue in the picture. You might even think that, yes, this category is going to be different from the others. But then it stabs you in the back.
You want one more for the road? Zombies are following you, and there are werewolves ahead. Do you wait for the Moon to come out, or plough forwards? The answer is clearly plough forwards: werewolves are useless in the daytime, right? WRONG! ZOMBIES ARE SLOW AND YOU SHOULD HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO WAIT FOR THE MOON. Frigging hell, Bright Side: Riddles and Puzzles.
And breathe.
