This is a Color Pals review, played and tested on Xbox One. Color Pals is available for the PS4/PS5, Xbox, and Switch for €3,99 on June 1st 2023.
Retrolike.net welcomes a new member to the team! Dennis is known in the European retro community for his retrogame flea market hunting videos, game and hardware reviews on his YouTube channel, “Dennis Fleaman“. His maiden review on Retrolike is the soon-to-be-released game, Color Pals.
Color Pals
Color blindness or color vision deficiency (the medical term) is more common than you might think. It affects approximately 1 in 200 women and 1 in 12 men. Around 300 million people in the world are colorblind and my son is one of them.
Despite the fact that my son is colorblind he has no problems playing “Color Pals”. One of the most colorful puzzle platformers I have ever seen. It was recently released by EastAsiaSoft. One of the biggest misunderstandings about people that are colorblind is that they see the world in black and white. There are in fact many variations of colorblindness. My son for example has red color blindness. This means that he has problems detecting the color red and red elements in other colors.
Gamers with monochromacy or total color blindness (people that have no ability to see any color at all) might want to skip this game because color pals focuses on colors and color changing puzzles.
No princess needs to be saved?
Our ”hero” in this indie game is a simple green cube with a cute face. He does not have a name or an elaborate backstory and there are no princesses that need to be saved. There are however 50 colorful puzzle levels that need to be completed.
Color problems
The goal of this game is quite simple. You move our Green cube ”hero” around on a single screen and you make sure that he reaches the portal that takes him to the next level or puzzle (picking up 3 stars in every level is an optional challenge).
That sounds easy enough but there is a colorful problem. Our green cube can only stand, move and touch other green cubes. Coming into contact with cubes of another color will result in a instant death and the restart of the level.
How do you deal with this colorful but deadly problem? By changing your color of course.
You do this by collecting lightning bolts. These bolts will change the color of your cube so that he can walk and touch other colored cubes and advance in the level. This is the main puzzle element and the claim to fame of the game color pals.
The puzzles start out simple enough but in the later levels you have to change your color multiple times, make precise jumps, choice between numerous paths, jump on trampolines and avoid enemies. It’s serious brain teasing fun.
Fun and easy G’s
It took me and my son only a couple of hours to complete all 50 maze levels of Color Pals.
We had a lot of fun but we also encountered some typical indie budget bugs/problems. The build up of the difficulty for example is not really spot on. We expected to spend a lot of time on the last level but that was not the case. Some earlier puzzles were a lot harder and that felt weird. Besides the unbalanced difficulty, there where some small glitches that seemed to show a lack of polish. But nothing could be considered broken and we are reviewing a low budget indie game here and not a triple A game. All in all, it’s a fun and colorful puzzle platformer that’s something else for an afternoon of gameplay. Achievement hunters take notes! You can add 2000G to your gamerscore in only a couple of hours with this game.
The idea to match a simple bright art style, upbeat music and color changing puzzles
is a rather clever one. This original concept from Double Mizzlee is sadly nullified by an unbalanced difficulty and a general lack of polish. These issues make Color Pals a mediocre game that helps you waste a few hours and boost your gamerscore but it could have been so much more.
