Polychromatic Funk Monkey

3 Bring on the funk.
One of the keys to making a good game is to give it personality. Sometimes, personality alone can take a game places where a fundamentally better game that lacks that spark could never go. Polychromatic funk monkey is one of those games with a spark.

Polychromatic funk monkey is a puzzle platformer where the main objective is to build stairs. Sounds boring right, but Farbs manages to make the atypical block puzzle game into something with a little flair that will hold your attention.

The controls are simple, where your actions are limited to movement, picking up and dropping blocks, and teleporting to previous spawn points called “telefunkers”. All of the actions combine to make an interesting list of approaches to your endless block stacking. While you’re playing you’ll find yourself stumbling upon different methods of working around obstacles and bringing blocks where you need them. Small nuances such as limiting the jump height while carrying blocks gives the game a bit of additional depth and building your staircases up requires more forethought than initially expected.

Considering the game’s difficulty; I’d say it’s unforgiving. There are many situations where a small misstep sets you much farther back than when you started. There is a lot of trial and error involved early on as you pick up what you’re capable of. After you reach a threshold where you are well aware of your possible actions, the games difficulty plateaus and it a sense of tedium begins to seep in.

Stylistically Polychromatic Funk Monkey is quite exuberant. The music combined with the sound effects makes a great sonic landscape. The graphics are very bold and contrasting. The world is predominantly rounded whereas the main character is as boxy as it gets so any confusion of what is what is nonexistent. I’d say that the style is what takes this game from functional puzzle platformer to being a good game.

The game is well polished with a concise and functional interface. The game’s mechanics are introduced to you using directly using text pop-ups and level design which forces you to use the described actions, so it’s all very streamlined.

Polychromatic Funk Monkey doesn’t bring much to the table, but what it does bring is drenched in such style that no one notices and it still becomes life of the party.