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The fourth of the mainline series is my favorite, they just seem to have gotten most everything right in this entry, the first thing you see -the map design- uses its’ 2048x2048 space the best of all. Just about every landmark is intertwined and connected visually by an important puzzle that makes up the meat and potatoes of the games’ plot.
This visual entanglement is reflected in the rest of the puzzles; the cutting tools enable you to make cloth and prune the titular Tree of Life, which in turn enables you to fix fishing nets , which progresses the feast puzzle which relies on another puzzle that you’ve probably completed earlier. They all link up together in the end and I think that’s very engaging and probably the best design for what’s at heart a puzzle game. Everything has its’ place, nothing is truly wasted, even the fruit trees, unilaterally considered the least useful food source in the entire series, has a purpose.
It is one of the easier games to complete because of this, but I think the cohesion is worth it, the achievements are already a source of challenge if that's what you're looking for.
This is also I believe the only game that incentivizes you to have a villager with multiple skills outside of the achievements, the keystone puzzle requiring a villager adept at both building and research. I think that’s an incredibly overlooked aspect of the game, since it’s very all or nothing on the skill front; you either have villagers who are masters of one specific thing (plus research for tech point farming) or you’re achievement hunting and you have a village of einsteins who are good at everything, there’s not really a happy medium from a casual perspective.
It’s not far behind its’ predecessor visually, though I prefer the setting and palette of The Secret City more, it’s very much on the same path. It’s interesting to see the collectables all have their own little landmarks throughout the map; the wind flutes even influence the soundscape of the game as they make noise during stormy weather.
There is one landmark I’m not huge on though… and this may be a controversial opinion, but oh my god the mausoleum looks so ridiculously out of place I hate it. At least The Secret City had more than one architecturally complex structure, so it didn’t make much of an impact but??? The mausoleum??? Who drew this?
? It doesn’t fit in with anything else and that’s not to say it looks BAD but where did it come from on a conceptual basis, the thing it replaced was a big shiny rock and doesn’t seem to draw on the overall Polynesian inspired look of the games either. It does kind of feel like an excuse for another series of collectables, which I feel could have been used wiser.