Technical Information
Developer: cookiecrayon
Publisher: cookiecrayon
Release Date: June 13th, 2021
Link: https://cookiecrayon.itch.io/mingle
Mingle is a game that was developed in 48 hours for the GMTK 2021 Game Jam.
Its objective is to find your match (an identical monster to yourself) among many others.
Final Thoughts – Analyzing the Game as a Whole
Graphics and UI
The artwork is minimalist and super cute. Each creature has its own animation, which gives it a unique personality.
Despite its simplicity, I found the character designs creative and charming.
It’s an extremely simple game, so right from the start, your character teaches you how to walk and how to merge with your match.
Upon finishing, the game asks if you want to play again.
The only flaw is the lack of a button to exit the game (to exit, you need to leave full-screen mode and close the window).
Soundtrack and Sound Effects
The game lacks sound effects.
When merging with your match, it makes a slight noise, but that’s all.
The music is cool, I found it exciting.
However, the volume of the music and sounds bothered me, it’s very low (even when setting my PC’s volume almost to maximum). When I started playing, I thought something was wrong because it was so quiet.
Gameplay
The gameplay is quite simple: your objective is to find your match and merge with them. When you do that, you turn into another creature and must find a new match… and so on, until there are no more creatures left.
Right from the start, the game provides instructions on how to use the controls. It’s very didactic, even young children could understand it.
Due to the limited color palette, I got confused many times because the monsters camouflage themselves in their environments. This makes the game a bit unpredictable.
However, the order of transformations is not random. So after playing for a while, the game “loses” some of its charm.
Replayability and Game Retention
Mingle is quite short (you can finish it in about 15 minutes) and, unfortunately, it wasn’t refined much.
I hope the developers implement new features in the future, because despite being a simple game, it has plenty of potential.
A time attack mode and new levels would make the gameplay longer and more enjoyable!
