A Novel Twist On Shape-Sorting (But Not The Puzzles To Match It)
David Attenborough has it all wrong. The natural world doesn’t coexist – it hates one another. Team Mammals despises Team Birds, and they have to be separated by large concrete blocks. We know this because we’ve played Habitat Shapes.
Habitat Shapes is a shape-sorting puzzle game, which you may have encountered if you’ve waded into the indie games on the Xbox Store. Their premise is remarkably simple: you have a blank space and several tiles that can be slotted together to fill it. Except the tiles come in different sizes, and the blank space is often an awkward shape. Matching one to the other isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds.
It’s hard not to think of Tetris and jigsaw puzzles as you lift an L-shape into an L-shaped hole. Anyone who is a fan of one or the other will get something from Habitat Shapes.
An Animal Royal Rumble
Shape-sorting games tend to apply a unique spin on the basic premise to keep things interesting. Habitat Shapes borrows from the riddle of a fox, chicken and bag of seed that needs to be taken from one shore to another in a boat. Basically, your shapes come in mammal, bird and herpetological (reptile and amphibian) categories, and no animal of one type can touch an animal of another type.
Drop a crocodile next to a wren and the wren will go “hell no”. A scuffle will take place and the crocodile will be yeeted out of the arena. So, you have to plan accordingly: how can you fill every last square in the arena without animals of contrasting types touching each other? Generic stone blocks, long like dividers, are the key to success.
There aren’t any surplus blocks. Every last creature, from the L-shaped giraffe to the T-shaped snakes, needs to be slotted onto the board. The result is that there are precious few solutions. Some, we would suggest, only have one solution. Luckily, a generous hint system is on hand (paw?). It applies the silhouette of a block to the board, allowing you to make headway towards a solution. Better yet, the hint system refreshes after only a few seconds’ wait.
You Might Need A Notebook For This One
As an example of a shape-sorter, Habitat Shapes is on the more difficult side. Aside from the hint system, everything is designed to make things difficult for the player. Shapes aren’t unique per animal faction, for example. Birds, herps and mammals all have a T-shape block or a long 5×1 block. You can’t spot a space and think ‘only a mammal will go there’. Feasibly, any of them can.
The puzzle designs aren’t helpful either. There are precious few layouts that have islands or thin peninsulas where only specific blocks could go. Most of the layouts, in fact, are reminiscent of each other: they’re almost all oblongish shapes that give precious little information about where to start, and with whom. It’s hard to even make a first move in Habitat Shapes.
Which is, I think, a bit of a flaw. When each level looks the same, and there are few unique blocks to populate them with, the layouts begin to feel repetitive. ‘Ah, it’s another bland outline with the same T, L and S shapes’. If Habitat Shapes was cheekier about its puzzles – a level with only one bird and the rest mammals, or a puzzle full of L shapes – then our brains might have contorted to fit the new problem. Instead, there’s a continuing sense of deja vu.
Having only one solution is a bold choice that forces deep thinking (if you’re good) and trial and error (if you’re not). But the bland layouts mean that there are few clues to get you started. It reminds me of rock-hard sudoku, where the only approach is to write something in willy-nilly and see if everything else fits around it. That feeling of being driven by failure, of “oh well, I guess the 5×1 block goes somewhere else” isn’t wholly satisfying, at least to me.
A Novel Mutation Of A Familiar Animal
But it’s not wholly unsatisfying either. I’m a fan of that weird animal-segregation mechanic. Knowing that herps can’t go next to birds, and vice versa, is something of a clue. It often means that you’re tessellating the birds as tightly as you possibly can, slotting them into a corner of the puzzle. Then you’re bounding them with concrete blocks, ensuring that a toucan’s head doesn’t poke out. The right solutions often feel right, giving you a sense that the current path is worth exploring.
Plus the art and theming has a colourful charm. There’s a lovely contrariness in tucking a cheetah into the nook of a giraffe’s neck. There are sweet touches too, in the way that the animals fight in a Looney Tunes’ puff of smoke if placed next to each other. And the achievements, of which there are 2000G, encourage you to make mistakes as well as succeed.
I can’t help feeling that Habitat Shapes is a puzzle-designer short of a really good game. With more finesse in its layouts and the shapes that it offers, it would have been more memorable and stimulating to play. It gets so close, too; it forces a player to segregate birds from mammals, which is a novel kick (or rhino-horn) to the butt of the shape-sorting genre. It’s a great idea, but the puzzles never quite exploit it well enough.
Important Links
Habitat Shapes is Optimised for Xbox Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/habitat-shapes-xbox-series/9nbh531cwkhb
There’s an Xbox One version too – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/habitat-shapes-xbox-one/9n61b2fdhqnr
