Venice

Venice is a game for the PC developed by Retro 64 and Published by Popcap (Popcap have recently purchased Retro64). The objective of the game is to collect the Italian treasures, stopping the buildings of Venice from sinking and being lost forever.

The rules are relatively simple, shoot your treasures at the treasures in each building to create pairs... sounds like a colour matcher doesn't it? Initially you'd be correct, however thankfully Venice has a number of tricks up it's sleeve. There is also a chaining system which involves hitting the higher symbols, and these symbols flowing down to lower ones. It's hard to explain but seeing it in action helps explain things.

The nice thing about Venice is that the game constantly evolves. As you progress through the harder levels new obstacles and features get introduced. There are a variety of obstacles and elements that affect the movement of your treasure in different ways, pushing things around, shapes to unlock, moving tiles to avoid, they all keep things interesting and stop you from getting bored. Add in the one shot puzzle modes that happen every few buildings and you have plenty to keep you entertained.

Once you get past a certain stage you unlock new game modes. The initial game mode is quite relaxed and gives you a chance to learn how things progress with little challenge to contend with. This all changes with the first of the unlocked modes. In this mode you have the added pressure of the water moving up as you play, so you need to act fast to clear the houses in time.

Venice is quite a unique concept. The first mode, Journey, starts off slowly, but once you unlock the later game modes (flood, trick shots, and survival) things take off and it becomes surprisingly addictive. It's one of those games that has a very low barrier to entry, and is very easy to keep playing. It suffers from the "one more go" syndrome that I'm sure we've all experienced.

I'm not sure how to categorise Venice, a colour matching game would be the simplest description but it's also very much a skill game. It's a nice twist on the colour matching genre and I'm pleased to see it being released. Hopefully the combination of Retro64 and Popcap will continue to create more of these original sorts of games.