KYE

"Give Kye a try, say I!"

Kye is one of those eponymous shareware games where objects bounce around on a small grid and strategy is involved to avoid most of them and find an exit or treasure. In this case, you control a green dot that needs to pick up all the diamonds on the screen to get to the next level. The general sort of obstacles you face include several monster types that track you in different manners, blocks you can push to the side, arrows that push in one direction until they hit a wall, one-way doors, or timers that disappear. At the end of each level you get a password so you don't have to start from scratch along with a brief comment.

But the most lasting part of the game is that it is so easy to make your own levels. A help file describes which keys stand for what, and although the variety of objects makes some letters unintuitive, you need only edit a template text file that comes with the game and load that file(a .kye extension) next time you start the game to test it out. You're even allowed to type in a line that gives a hint. With WordPad pulled up in one small window(levels are fixed at 30 by 20) and Kye in the other, you can whip up new challenges very nicely.

In Kye you have four lives in which to reach the next level, and control is pretty simple, even permitting diagonal movement although you cannot push solitary blocks in those directions. If you make a mistake you can't recover from, it is not so inconvenient, as hitting a couple of hot-keys will allow you to reset quickly. This makes up for the nuisance of occasionally losing two Kyes quickly, as the game doesn't give the dead a moment's pause. In general the hot-keys available allow you to switch rapidly enough, so that although I've often bitten my nails at the lack of an undo feature and other times I rue the lack of a suitable speed adjustment, there really is enough user-friendliness to make up for these.

But what about the details, the icons that push you around and get pushed? Part of the fun of the game for me was to discover what they all did, but even knowing that I had to see them in action to understand their practical uses. Each monster seems to track you differently--one monster in fact eats anything in its way, while others draw horizontal or vertical beads on you, some occasionally move randomly away, and all proceed at various paces. It's often necessary to trap a few monsters and juke the rest. You also have some entities that will, if uninhibited, go in the direction that the arrows inside them point although circles can roll to the side. There are also one-way doors(you can't tell which way until you touch it) as well as pseudo-walls that disappear when you step on them. Perhaps most interesting are magnets positioned horizontal or vertical that will attract anything close, including you. There are also blocks that can be moved as well as ones that change arrowed blocks' directions or count seconds down before they disappear, and weird ships may bump back and forth between walls, pushing anything not securely anchored. All these factors give opportunities for level writers to create standard considerations for any puzzle game; in an ideal level, there's a time limit to complete some action before proceeding, and subsequent diamonds must be gotten in some rough order. The sample Kye levels provided do a good job of this although they seem to get simpler as they go along.

Although jumping replaces animation, many of the icons are an attractive yellow(transparent ones indicate they can be pushed around) and red to contrast with the grey, and they stand out from the bright-green kye. Monsters are generally dark but cute, and you have many different walls types with detailed rounding that ensure the game never looks blocky even if everyone in it hops from square to square. Every non-wall extends to one pixel inside its boundary, so you also don't need a grid to tell where everything fits, yet the game never feels crowded. There isn't much concentrated action in the game, but watching a bunch of circular arrows spill out of confinement gives the feeling of watching someone open a messy closet with half of the contents falling on him.

You'll certainly be able to decide quickly if you like this bright little game, so it's worth giving the game a spin. It's somewhere on the outskirts of Lolo and Lode Runner, and although it just misses being as enjoyable or challenging as either(after a couple of hours of play, it's tougher to create a non-trivial level than to play your average one,) people who do not rely on heavy technical effects will enjoy the quick burst of action and strategy it affords. For a one-person shareware effort, it is remarkable and pleasing and will certainly last ten years more as people continue to contribute and post levels to the web.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/07/02, Updated 02/07/02