Game Review: Busy Busy Beaver by Daniel Linssen

A close shave resulted from a precision fall in Busy Busy Beaver

TL;DR: A fun, quick puzzle platformer, Busy Busy Beaver isn’t as difficult as Linssen’s previous game, the amazing Javel-ein, and is perhaps just a bit less engaging, but it’s charming sense of humor makes up for it. If you’re up for an hour’s worth of platform puzzles, try it out. Built in just 40 hours of marathon game jamming over a weekend, it’s remarkably polished for a game produced so quickly.

Download Busy Busy Beaver here.

You’re a beaver. You need wood to build up your house. Collect the wood, until you have enough, but make sure you don’t touch spikes or eat so much wood that you have no platforms left to get back home.

Simple, yes? The challenge is mild to moderate until the last few levels, but it’s a relaxing kind of intellectual challenge, where you don’t have to think too much, but just enough to make the game interesting without being frustrating.

I got stuck on the very first level, until I learned this tip: Press Down+Z to eat wood that you’re standing on. (I actually tried this early on, and couldn’t get it to work, which left me confused as to how to beat the first level, until I learned the secret: To eat down, you have to be in the center of a grid block. The level is laid out over an invisible grid, and if you’re standing on a grid line, you won’t be able to eat down, even if you’re standing on a grid line between two blocks of wood. As a player, I would have expected to eat both blocks when straddling a boundary, rather than neither.)

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