Shaban

Colorful animated graphics with side-scrolling locations and cute characters really catches the eye, once you start the game. While the first scenes look a little bit gloomy, after half an hour of play, when you get to the small town filled with sunlight, Shaban reveals in all its glory. Most backgrounds resemble the illustrations, found in some kind of children’s book. Some of them are just fun, the others are really picturesque, but in general the whole game is drawn in a pretty unusual graphic style with high attention to detail, crooked little houses, oddly cute characters and lots of animated elements. In addition, unlike most modern casual games, Shaban is a third person game, i.e. you can see your character running around your screen in so called 2,5D or pseudo three-dimensional world, which is also a quite considerable advantage.

Combining a rather unusual, charming graphics with a touching story about a grim shepherd and his brave sheep, which, oddly enough, is based on a Persian legend, with nice comic book style cut scenes, amusing characters and lots of funny moments, Shaban could be a real gem, if not for a couple of very significant deficiencies. The first thing that causes some inconvenience, once you start playing the game, is the complete absence of text. The shepherd Shaban and the little nameless lamb, who turns out to be the second playable character, communicate with each other by using strange interjections, such as “Baa”, “Oh” and “Yeah”, think with odd pictures or symbols like “!¿#?*”, and do not keep a diary, which is perhaps not surprising in the case of the sheep.

Instead of a clear tutorial, there is a list of symbols, on which the pointer changes its view when you hover over an active area, and some brief instructions on the game’s interface. It goes without saying that it is not an Arkanoid, where everything is clear and understandable even without further detailed explanations. Shaban is an adventure game, and three-page tutorial is definitely not enough to introduce the player into the course of the game. For example, there is not even a hint of that the inventory appears when you move the pointer to the top of the screen. Damn, it’s not a puzzle, to rack your brains over how to open the inventory!

There is no diary, no convenient buttons on the screen, to which we are accustomed. The inventory window is constantly slipping away, and the only way to open the game’s map is to press the «M» button on your keyboard. To tell the truth, the map is not very useful for navigation purpose, but you can use it to instantly travel from one location to another, which can significantly save you time when traveling around the city. In addition, there is only one level of difficulty, though the game begins easy and grows harder. Active areas are highlighted, and the Hint button takes about two minutes to recharge. The majority of puzzles are extremely illogical, which leads to a very frustrating experience. In fairness, it should be noted that the pointless actions of the main characters and the unpredictable turn of events make the game even more complex and hard, forcing you to turn off your brains and simply iterate through all possible solutions.

Speaking of puzzles, despite the fact that there is almost nothing new or unique, the developers have managed to cruelly complicate the common mini-games and riddles, you’ve probably already seen many times before. For example, the background in the puzzle of tangled wires and nodes was so dark that I simply could not distinguish the wires. Taking unto account, that the puzzles are unskippable, playing Shaban you need to be ready to seek a solution by brute force, which, to be honest, is not very pleasant and interesting. Or, take for example, the task with gears at the beginning of the game. To get a piece of the large gear from the hollow, you need to find a magnet, then catch a caterpillar, then attach the magnet to its back and run it into the hollow. Just tell me, could you ever come up with an idea to catch a nasty caterpillar and secure a magnet to its back?

There are also several minor blots, which, however, cause considerable inconvenience. For example, after you use a hint in the first hidden object scene, the button becomes inactive for a couple of minutes. There is no timer, no hourglass, no chart indicating how much time is left to wait. As a result, when I just started playing this game, I thought that there is only one hint per scene. Furthermore, all cut scenes might be closed manually by pressing the “Skip” button. It is not such a significant drawback, and it doesn’t spoil the game experience, but, again, when I just started playing this game, I killed about a minute just waiting for a continuation when, as it turned out a bit later, the cut scene was already over.

In general, as the saying goes, the first fry is bound to be a flop. With its enormous potential, Shaban gave me a lot more trouble than fun due to a number of awkward shortcomings. The absence of dialogue and diary deprives the game of much of the fun, and the illogicality of some of the situations and puzzles ultimately poisons the whole experience. To tell the truth, when Peta Game releases its second game, I will undoubtedly give it a try, but I can’t recommend Shaban to anyone, except the hardcore admirers and the lovers of casual exotic. Have nice time!