«A surreal, ravaged landscape lies before you. All is still, until a flash of motion catches your eye. You whirl around, your heart pounds... An enormous, impossibly horrible monster rises up from the horizon! What an awful shape! And yet, somehow familiar...
Produced by Norway's Orgdot Media Lab, The ABC Game is an educational game aimed at familiarizing 6 year-olds with the alphabet. Despite being short, uncomplicated and an absolute breeze for anyone already familiar with the world of letters, Orgdot's beautiful illustrations and animation make The ABC Game a must-see and, after some of the devious brain-smashers submitted in our recent contest, a bit of a rest for throbbing minds everywhere». read the rest of Jays review here
Move the mouse to look around the landscape. Monsters soon appear, each resembling a letter of the alphabet. Clicking on one opens up a mini-game in which you must finesse a scattered group of lines and curves into the shape of the proper letter. Click on any (non-empty) grid cell and the contents will squirm and reform themselves organically into a new or rotated shape. At first this appears to be a grid-based rotation puzzle like so many others, although The ABC Game's take on the concept has one dubious distinction: each panel has only two completely arbitrary positions. As a result, forming the letters is a simple exercise in trial and error, and thankfully brief.
Analysis: My favorite part of ABC was panning around the landscape, observing its inhabitants. It could have been nice to have a reason to explore and interact with the scenery a bit more, perhaps by making the monsters slightly more difficult to find or catch. Ultimately, The ABC Game succeeds at the challenging task of appealing both to the very young and to their elders, although I do wish Orgdot could have thrown a few more bones my way. Enjoy!
Learning yours ABCs in 123s
The ABC game was commissioned by Gyldendal, one of Norways leading publishinghouses. It is designed to complement one of gyldendals readingbooks for primaryschools. The game fokuses on the shapes of the letters in the alphabet and aims to make 6 year olds confident and familiar with the characters. The illustrated letters are painted by Stefano Lemma and the sound is composed by Geir Bremer Øvrebø. The game was chosen to be a flashforward 2003 finalist and has won several awards her in Norway.