Ian Snyder's Valo requires the same painstakingly delicate touch as removing a funny bone or charley horse from the classic game Operation, albeit with a much gentler, more abstract style. Use your expert pointing and clicking skills to navigate dangerous fields of red squares while clicking on or dragging the mouse over all the blue squares to earn points and advance to the next level.
Although you can simply click on a square to remove it, dragging the mouse will leave behind a black line. Interestingly, quicker mouse movements will increase the size of the line, and slower movements minimize it. Larger lines help you clear multiple blocks simultaneously but, of course, avoiding red squares becomes more difficult. Several power-up squares will come in handy: purple squares add time to the clock, green squares provide bonus points and yellow squares replenish your health. Some levels also feature packs of flying red squares, which can damage you even while you're not drawing a line. The timer in the corner of the screen keeps track of the bonus points you'll receive after clearing the level. Take too long and it can fall below zero, actually subtracting points from your score!
Analysis: I would have welcomed a wider variety of hazards and more devious level design, but Valo is successful in its simplicity. The subtle soundtrack, generated by your actions, and the stark black squiggles left behind after clearing a level create a pleasant, distinctive atmosphere. While I found the default control style perfectly usable, a '2-click' mode is also available; in this mode you click once to activate line-drawing, and click again to turn it off.Valo also offers a randomize feature which, unfortunately, merely offers the same set levels as the normal game in a random order.
Cheers to Ian and Sergio for sending this one in!
Lovely addition to the 'mousing-skill' genre; I remember playing this some time ago and enjoying it a lot. I really like the soft colors and tones, feels very soothing somehow. The black line you leave behind reminds me of the Jackson Pollock emulator.
Gameplay tip: If you're like me, you'll be drawing smooth controlled lines to try to cover everything; that generally is the most effective way to do it, but don't forget that you can just click on squares too - when they're not naturally lined up, a bunch of direct clicks is faster and easier.
btw - I got 89,991.
At least on Firefox I could not click -- once I clicked the line was being drawn. Lovely game though. I got 16040 first time through.
This is such a cute game. Love the quirky sound effects!
Those moving red squares are tricky.. :P
nice game.
am i the only one whose game seems to freeze after the level is completed? is it just loading the next level? if so there should be a loading message or something.
Aly - You might've switched it to 2-click mode before you started the game; there's an option to change it right at the bottom. 1-click mode makes single clicks a lot easier. I'm sure Firefox has nothing to do with it, since I was playing on it as well.
laptopdude - I didn't get any loading messages, but each level popped up fast enough that I never noticed a 'freeze' - usually less than half a second. Are you saying it just hangs after the first level? Or you get to level 2 but it takes a while?
More tips:
don't pay too much attention to the timer - you won't die or anything if it runs out. You *will*, however, if you try to rush and hit a bunch of red squares. So don't sweat about losing some points, take your time and do it right.
Remember not to take the last blue square until you've collected all the bonus squares on the level (green, yellow, purple) or you'll just go to the next level.
There's a trick to taking the purple and yellow squares - they replenish your timer and health respectively right back up to the maximum (not just adding a fixed amount), so it's useful to leave them till just before the end of the level.
That way any health or time lost during most of that level is essentially neutralized; effectively meaning you can deliberately crash into all the pesky moving red squares (as long as you don't die), and take however long you want to finish the level and still leave with full health and 500+ bonus timer points.
valarauka,
after the initial countdown and the completion of any level, there is a 10 second pause looking at the screen (the same since level completion). And then it loads and nothing else is wrong.
Except, it takes like half a minute for the window to close in which time i get a "program not responding" message. It closes right after the message pops up.
also, my comp lags a bit during the ten-second pause...
i click a link and the page comes up 10 secinds later
and whenever a new level starts part of the time bar is already elapsed...like i missed 10 seconds of the levl or something
Sounds like the flash is lagging somehow. What browser are you on? And do you have the latest flash player version?
It crashed my Firefox on level completion. Looks like a decent game but the code seems to need some more work.
another great find. thanks jay.
also thanks for the spoilers!
yuhu.finally.
I thought it would never end.
brilliant game and as much as I wanted to quit i just couldn't.
end score: 229979
that lag thing happens to me too, on firefox, after every singel level- until firefox popped a window saying that a script is unresponsive and might crush my comp.
Reozul - very impressive! I got past 130k+ last time I played, but those flocks of red squares become a real pain later on...
well, i'm using firefox and my flash is version 9,0,28,0. I think this is the latest one--it is the version offered for download on adobe's website.
A winning strategy is to go super fast. the line will get huge, destroy everything,and go on to the next level before it can register your loss.
i also have a lag/crashing problem in firefox. i even changed the movie quality to "low" and it still doesn't work well. i keep getting "abort the script?" prompts. neat concept though
The problems people are encountering sound like a memory leak issue, a common problem when programmers do not clean up the objects they instantiate (create) when they're finished with them.
My guess is that's the issue here. Probably all those pink and blue squares are continuing to hang around long after the level in which they appeared is gone.
It's just an educated guess, though.
It's cool to see Valo up here
As jay suggested, I've updated Valo to delete the objects created, but I think the real problem lies in the actual creation of the levels themselves.
Thanks for checking out the game everyone!
Beautiful game, I feel much calmer now :)
Just out of interest, is it known how many levels there are? I got to level 48 but would like to know how many more I needed!
there are 100 levels, thats why I said that it appears to never end.
Wow, amazing!
only got pass to level 46, if I'm not mistaken.
i hate the moving red squares :(
Brilliant. I moved to NY,NY, USA a week ago and leave in another and my cousin showed me this. Love the game, kinda of relaxing but not as relaxing as Boomshine, my new fav. Anyway, Brilliant!!
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