Game Review: Love you to Bits

Seb's latest obsession is Nova the robot.  We love her to bits.  And the crazy thing is, she's not even in the game much, because at the start of it she's BLOWN INTO TINY PIECES BY THE EVIL DR EROS!!  Yes, we've just finished Love you to Bits (PEGI-7).  What a wonderful little game!  Well worth the £3.79 it currently costs on Google Play, plus it goes into your family library so that you can all play it.  And it looks totally amazing on our new Samsung Tab S2.  (In fact, I'd recommend you play it on a tablet if possible, it's a bit small on a phone to spot all the details.)

LOL I just realised I sound like I'm doing a lot of product placement.  I'm not getting paid for this.  Honest.  ;-)

The game's a point and click puzzle adventure.  Generally you can solve the puzzles by wandering backwards and forwards picking up everything and checking to see if you can then use the things you've just picked up.  Sometimes, though, you have to do things in a certain order to progress.  And some of the levels definitely had us stumped for quite a while.  And we did not find all the extra collectables.  Boo hoo.

The premise is that Dr Eros (evil dinosaur scientist), who created Nova, attacks at the beginning of the game and blows her apart.  You (as her boyfriend) then have to find all the pieces and reassemble her.  Also, you can collect objects that contain her memories, and feed them back into her.  All her memories can be accessed via the computer she's hooked up to, and can be watched over and over.  They're cute little animated stories.  Some are very funny, and some tug at the ol' heartstrings.  

Reassembling Nova and giving her her memories back

So, in each level you're on a different planet; you have one part of Nova you have to find, and a couple of memories.  When you obtain the piece of Nova you can teleport back to your ship and see your progress, and watch any memories you've found.  Gradually you get more and more invested in both Nova and Kosmo.  We really wanted to get them back together, despite the sticky issues surrounding robot/human relationships.  (We aren't going into that with Seb.  But hey.  Blade Runner.  That's all I have to say about that.)

It's hard to say what my favourite level was.  'Matter of Perspective' was clever, with lots of platforms you had to rotate around to get to different sections of the level.  It took a lot of thought.  And 'A Dungeon in Panels' was fun since you wandered from comic book panel to comic book panel, becoming larger and smaller as you did so.  That said, there are a few moments I found a bit questionable.  For instance you do kill some people.  'Trapped in the Lab' is a sort of evil lab where they're doing some sort of crazy monster construction, but is it right to kill people who work there so that you can put your girlfriend back together?  I really don't know.  But perhaps I'm overthinking things...

I should also mention the music.  When we first played the game, Seb said the music at the start was the saddest he'd ever heard.  Great compositions - they add such a lot to the atmosphere of the game.  Despite its cartoony graphics it has a lot of depth to it.  

Totally recommended!  Great fun to play together as a family.  It took all our brains to complete it.  :-D