Tiny Biomes Review

A Puzzle Game That Deactivates The Brain

It’s not often that I can empty a room by playing a game. All three members of my family left while I was playing Tiny Biomes. That hasn’t happened since Portal 2, when the disorientation made my wife seasick. In the case of Tiny Biomes, it was because of the obnoxious presentation. None of them could bear the screen-shakes and clicky-clacky sounds of rotating paths. I guess it was the opposite of ASMR.

It’s a bit weird raising audio-visual issues in the first paragraph of a review, but it was that bad. I feel some sympathy for my family. Whenever I placed a piece, the whole screen would shake, as if the terrain was as heavy as a hundred kitchen worktops. It made my eyes hurt after a while. The screen-shaking also combo’d horribly with the speed at which you can play Tiny Biomes. It is ridiculously, ludicrously easy, so you can bulldoze through levels at speed. That means concentrated earthquakes on the screen and clicking sounds from both game and pad. It was enough to send the family barmy.

I should note that this audio-visual headache doesn’t apply to the soundtrack. If there is something that I enjoyed in Tiny Biomes, it was the music. It tries to ignore the SFX, which dances on the side of the stage like a loon, and goes hard. I went in search for it on Spotify and Shazam but alas, no luck. 

Come On, Do Something Interesting

The music and sound-effects dominated the notes that I took while playing Tiny Biomes. The rest of the game barely registered. It’s not that Tiny Biomes is bad, it’s just that it’s inoffensively long. The prolonged lack of anything notable got to me, in the end. 

At the risk of sending you to sleep, here is the gist of Tiny Biomes. You have a grid of squares, some locked in place, some not. On those squares are paths, and your job is to connect paths to all of the end pieces (locked, dead-ends). No piece can be orphaned: there has to be one long, occasionally branching path that connects them all. 

Unlike a lot of these path-making games on the Xbox Store (and there are a lot of them: Eastasiasoft and Afil Games in particular have a thing for them) you don’t get to swap or move the pieces. The pieces are socketed in place, but you can still rotate them. So, you’re moving to a square, tapping A or B to rotate them, and then moving on once they’re in a position that you fancy. 

Of course, since you only have the powers of rotation, the permutations for a puzzle come drastically down. Let’s start ticking off the opportunities for difficulty: each end piece is locked; lake and mountain pieces are locked; the end pieces need to connect to a path; if a piece is on the edge of the grid, you probably don’t want a path off the board. The strategy reduces down to become thimble-sized. For about 80% of the blocks on the board, there is no question of which way it needs to be rotated. Click-clack-screenshake: you have completed most of the puzzle. 

Saved By The Stars

There is some challenge, we suppose, generated by the star-ranking for each level. Rotate each piece a small (but not minimum) number of times and you will get three stars. In most cases, it’s almost impossible NOT to get three stars: we weren’t trying particularly hard and only had ten levels that would have needed replay. But you’re also not punished or rewarded for that ranking. If there were achievements, cosmetic unlocks or something for the effort, it would have been welcomed. You certainly don’t fail if you get anything like zero stars. 

There was a burning hope on the Main Menu. There are three biomes, Forest, Volcano and Winter, and I was eager to see how they would change things up. ‘Volcano’ sounded cool: we wondered whether eruptions would disrupt play. Perhaps ‘Winter’ would mean some sliding effects. Ah, the optimism of youth. They are all exactly the same, outside of the colour of the blocks.

What Tiny Biomes became was a speed-run. The game wasn’t going to offer any challenge, so we added our own. How fast could we complete a level? Finishing a grid in one minute while still getting three-stars was the gauntlet, and we found it to be more interesting than anything else on offer. 

A Long Walk Through a Short Concept

There really isn’t anything else for us to write: you have all mentally played and completed the game by reading this review. There is not an aspect of it that we haven’t described. Which is its fatal problem, of course: it is tiny in terms of breadth, as the title implies, yet it is also way too long for what it has to offer.

There are clearly fans of path-making games on the Xbox, otherwise why would there be so many. But that creates a problem for Tiny Biomes: when there are so many competitors, many of which have more challenge, variety and breadth, then why pick this one up? For the annoying screenshake, clearly.

Important Links

Restore Nature One Tile At A Time In Tiny Biomes – https://www.thexboxhub.com/restore-nature-one-tile-at-a-time-in-tiny-biomes/

Buy Tiny Biomes on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/tiny-biomes/9PCRVX4BPKFF/0010