Bob Came in Pieces

Bob Came in Pieces is a game unlike any other that I’ve ever played. It really is in a genre of it’s own – it’s a spaceship-building puzzle platforming. I’m not sure whether or not this type of genre will really take off and fly (no pun intended) but it is certainly a fresh take on some old genres. The concept of the game is fairly simple: Bob crashes his spaceship, so in order to get home he’s gonna have to pick up the broken pieces scattered around to rebuild his ship completely. This seems fairly standard, but the execution of this concept is far the norm.

These pieces you collect are not simple collection items that count towards a required total to finish the level, nor are they automatically added to your ship that give you a set piece towards finishing a specific puzzle in that level. The pieces are pipes, connectors, increasingly powerful rockets, and pulls beams are some of the pieces you’ll get. While the game guides you towards using a certain piece in a specific place, it never forces your hand, allowing you to be creative in your ship building and puzzle solving.

Your round ship has 8 sockets to attach these pieces and each pieces affects both the movement and balance of the ship. You add pieces to your ship by landing on ship building platform (which is also a save point) and choosing your pieces through a drag and drop interface, something that seems similar to a robotic “Spore” (albeit with less options).

The puzzles are equally as intuitive as the ship building portion. The difficulty curves gradually, holding your hand less and less until your on your own. Everything in the environment acts the way you would expect it with realistic physics and weight. Boxes will fall into place, additional thrusters will move you quickly in the direction you’d like but make stopping a chore, and picking up objects with your pull beam will require a good amount of force to move them.

The level design is unabashedly classic and traditional. You’ll see rolling forests, underground caves, ice worlds and everything in between. Each level offers a different type of puzzle and new obstacles all presented in a pseudo-3D environment. The levels offer many different options for traversing them, sometimes offering a surprising amount of directions before the correct direction reveals itself.

The game isn’t all peaches and cream. There are a few bugs that pop up here and there, usually ending up along the lines of “I’m stuck in a corner somewhere and I have no way to get out”. Thankfully there are plenty of checkpoints that you won’t have to do too much to get back to where you were. Despite the few bugs, this is a highly polished game, especially for an indie title. Many people who aren’t familiar to gaming might even think it came from a AAA developer. The amount of work and effort that the developers have put into the game is obvious – the budget pricing model helps as well.

It’s hard not to recommend this game. For about $10 on Steam you can get a unique puzzle platformer with excellent quality regarding art style, music and general tone. While it may not have much replay value, completionists will love the large amount of achievements that have been included.