Slip Away Mystify Suffers From Slipups – Slip Away Mystify Review

This game is an undersea challenge in which you control your jellyfish character through dangerous caverns to reach keys that unlock higher levels, while collecting gems along the way. The game has potential to be an enjoyable little title, but has several issues hindering its success. First, the intro to the game is a non-interactive animation. You're visually shown what to do in the game, where instead you should be prompted to try the controls, and get a feel for the gameplay. Once the animation is done, you're thrown into the first level with tap left/right instructions, and left to explore the level. Normally, this type of introduction could work, but the one-life/start-over gameplay leads to frustration. The level design suffers from what has been described in other reviews: the beginning stages are particularly difficult, taking numerous attempts to complete what should be simple, easy goals to build player confidence. After your character (repeatedly) braves spiky walls to reach the level goal, you're presented with a key contained in smooth-looking semicircular ring, which you might expect to be a haven after all the effort required to reach that point. But no, touch any part of the ring and it's start over (again). It could make sense to add this level of difficulty at higher levels and introduce an additional challenge, but including this behavior in the first levels is a recipe for game deletion for all but the most dedicated players. Enabling the character to take up three hits before having to start over would at least allow some planning to complete the level. In terms of style, the game sports well-designed visuals, and the cute jellyfish character responds with the appropriate physics behavior. The dubstep soundtrack isn't bad, but seems out of place given the undersea setting and the floating, undulating movement of your jellyfish. Speaking of the character, you will unlock different jellyfish as you progress, but it's not clear whether the characters have any significantly different abilities, or are just style upgrades. As it stands, Slip Away Mystify is fairly daunting out the gate and will likely appeal only to those seeking high difficulty challenges. Hopefully the developers can rethink the gameplay and level progression, but in its current state, it's difficult to recommend.
Review by netdzynr on Slip Away Mystify.