Hairy Tales has been released for Linux

A couple of months ago we talked about the possibility of a Linux version of Hairy Tales. What yesterday was pure speculation, today it has become a reality! Hairy Tales is now available for Linux at Desura.

EDIT: The game is already fully available on Desura, it's no longer a standalone download only.


Thanks to the nice people at Arges Systems I've been beta testing the game and I've got through enough of it to produce a review, so here it is.


Game Information:
Name: Hairy Tales
Released: August 29, 2003
Developer: Arges Systems
Rating: 9/10

Hardware Specifications:
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz × 4
Video Card: GeForce GTX 650/PCIe/SSE2
Memory: 8GB DDR3 1333

System Specifications:
Distribution: Ubuntu 12.10 64bit
Graphics Driver: Nvidia Experimental 310
Desktop Environment: Unity





The story behind Hairy Tales is quite simple and straightforward: the land of the Hairys, these shabby-looking folk spirits, has been covered with an evil ooze. It is your task to guide the three of them through many dangerous levels, each one throughout a distinct world, and help them cleanse the widespread corruption and fight some evil foes along the way.



Performance

The game is delivered as a universal build, with both 32- and 64-bit support. The 64-bit binary results in a crash and a core dump before reaching the main menu screen, but that doesn't constitute a severe setback since the 32-bit binary works flawlessly (with the appropriate 32-bit libraries, of course). However, I expect a new version addressing this problem and enabling the game to run natively in 64-bits being released soon.

Apart from that, the game runs perfectly smooth in my system with graphical settings maxed out. So it's expected to be fully playable on older machines.





Graphics and sound

The graphics are very shiny and colourful, specially considering Hairy Tales is a simple puzzle game... that is, at first sight (more on this in the next section). They are also pretty detailed (if you don't zoom in too much) and are a good example of the looks that can be achieved with the Unity engine.

Regarding the sound FX and the music, they generally serve their purpose, although I wouldn't mind a wider variety in in-game melodies. There are only 3 different tunes (one for each world) plus another one for the boss fights, and they can become monotonous rather quickly.





Gameplay

Without a doubt, gameplay is the strongest aspect of the game. As I said before Hairy Tales could be prematurely dismissed as nothing more than a simplistic puzzle game, where your only task is to anticipate the route the main character will follow and adjust the tiles accordingly before letting him go. And certainly this will be your only task during the first few levels, where you'll only need to move and rotate a couple of tiles so the Hairy can catch the magical Alatuir stone, and thus be able to eliminate the corruption. But as you progress through it, the game gradually introduces new mechanisms and gimmicks that you'll have to learn and master in order to be able to overcome future challenges. I'm talking about fences that change the direction of the Hairys or wells that let them 'teleport' to other locations, but also about weapons to fight the evil Kikimoras.

This fighting aspect alone can justify the action element in the game description, but for me what really makes it a truly action-strategy game is the fact that in most of the advanced levels there simply are not enough tiles to build a path to the goal for the Hairy and you have to rearrange them on the go, as the little spirit is running through them. So it's not enough to come up with a way to solve the level, you also have to implement it. And do it quickly and without error, or else chances are the Hairy will fall off a tile or run into some nasty spikes or Kikimoras.

The game also has a certain replayability value, as you are not required to cleanse all of the corruption in a level or collect all of the mushrooms in order to pass to the next level (in fact, you can even skip one level if you get stuck). So the obsessive-compulsive inclined as myself will surely try to obtain a 100% completion rate on every level once they beat the game.

Now that I mentioned the rate of corruption removal, I've got a little complaint to make: the game doesn't make very clear what you have to do to obtain the aforementioned 100% rate. One would naturally assume that all the corrupted tiles in the level must be cleansed, but it's actually only the ones with spikes or enemies in them that must be uncorrupted. This puzzled me quite a lot, as sometimes I missed some corrupted tiles but I got a 100% rate nonetheless, while some other times I didn't. I only fully understood it when I asked the developer, who kindly explained it to me. So I think a little explanation, either in the main menu or in the in-game hints, might be in order to prevent further confusion.





Overall

To sum it up, I think Hairy Tales is a great game that stands out for its own merits amidst the puzzle genre. The carefully implemented learning curve, along with the gradual introduction of new game elements (up until the later levels), help keep the player interested and going. As a puzzle fanatic, I rate it 9/10 and encourage everybody to buy it and give it a try.

· Buy it here.

· Vote it on Steam Greenlight


Unfortunately there's no demo available, so you'll have to take my word for the merits of this game... or will you? Well, at least a couple of our readers won't, as we have two Hairy Tales Desura keys to give away! Since there's currently another giveaway going on we'll wait until it ends, and we'll be giving more details and officially announcing this promotion later on, most probably during the weekend or next week. Can you wait until then? ;) Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.