What in the world is this game? Also, why did I enjoy it? Questions to answer right now, based on the following impressions.
Feed the AI is an interesting game from Weird Kid Games. It’s like a ticket game at the local Dave & Busters, where once you drop a coin and play it, you win some tickets, and then try again for no good reason. Even in its simplicity, playing that ticket game makes you feel the need to go back and keep playing it, if not only to do better and gain more tickets. Feed the AI thrives off that type of addictive simplicity, as it wants you to merely collect onscreen blocks as fast as you can, while using a large skills tree as a motivating factor to keep going back to the same gameplay repeatedly.
While the game doesn’t feature too many other layers, those above goals are enough for a gamer to keep playing. It’s strange how well this works and how hooked someone can get on a simple concept of collecting small digital squares. I didn’t think that I would enjoy it as much as I did, but what started as a few minutes turned into a couple of hours, and unlocking everything available in this demo.
So, how does the gameplay work? When the game begins, the player is a small yellow block that is cast into darkness with only a guiding light coming from an AI in the middle. The player must navigate the yellow block around the dark level and gather small dark blocks to send to the center AI icon. For every certain number of blocks gathered, the game pings the level and allows the player to see the group of blocks briefly. It will motivate the player to keep gathering a large amount of blocks to try to see that ping released again.
To make this more interesting, the player has a finite amount of time, 20 seconds or less, that counts down, and then the player’s blocks are tallied. That tallied number gives the player points to unlock and expand the AI’s intelligence, which adds more gameplay attributes to the hunt for blocks in the dark.
Now, those attributes could be gathering more blocks at one time, or they could be magnetizing blocks to come toward the yellow block, thus gathering more at a time without moving. For every new number tallied and every new attribute unlocked, the ability to gather more blocks quickly becomes an addictive goal that plays right into this circular attribute design.
In the later levels of the game, the AI gets some deadly blocks added, which, if collected, help to dissolve and destroy the blocks in its vicinity, preventing the player from gathering them. This small roadblock adds more intrigue and intensity to the gameplay and provides more sophisticated gameplay decision-making than one would expect from this simple concept of a game. It’s impressive how complicated the game can get in the higher levels.
So, with all the above said, can I pinpoint why Feed the AI is addictive? No clue! I just know that by gaining more attributes and pushing the ability to collect blocks further, beating my own score, and wanting to keep playing the game to unlock everything and get better, makes for a very fun time that is hard to put down.
Anyway, Feed the AI is simple; it contains simple motivating rewards that improve the gameplay, and plays off the addictive nature of gamers who desire to one-up each other. I wish I could tell you that there is more to this game, but there isn’t. It’s simple, it’s fun, and it’s a game that I can’t wait to see when it releases sometime this year.
Until its release, I think everyone should try the demo. It’s worth your time and worth a solid look.
