Game Review – Fossil Hunters

A map of fossiles you need to move, and an explosion to the right

3D puzzlers are hard. They’re hard to play, though they’ve only gotten more intuitive to play over time, but I’ve never been one for spatial awareness so they’ve been not something that I’ve been particularly interested in playing.

Fossil Hunters is a game I’m interested in playing. The company who makes it, Reptoid Games, describe it perfectly as a casual action adventure game. The goal is to dig down the various levels, create your goal fossils (which are generally fun and ridiculous) while dealing with the dig sites. During your digging you’ll find notes from previous diggers, who have been lost on the various dig sites.

When you go down to dig, there isn’t anything that’s outrageously difficult or dangerous. There are crawlers who will attack your fossils, and destroy them but they are afraid of the light and it becomes another piece of the puzzle. You do have to worry about cave-ins, when you dig too much in one area too quickly, because a pile of dirt will drop down destroying whatever’s underneath, and then you have small pits you need to jump over. However, the game isn’t setup so that you have to worry about timing your jumps, you just really need to be jumping around the pit and you’ll get over.

The puzzle itself is really a 2D puzzle, in a 3D space which is a great way to deal with the problem of perspective. You want to match the tiles that you have to drag around the beautiful backgrounds, until you get what you need to advance to the next level or to get gems from the voice on the radio that hired you.

The art is fantastic, especially with all the notes that you find and how they end up in your journal. It’s chalk full of fun personality as you discover more about the people who left the notes behind. My favorite moment is early on and one of the notes is a tea stain, that gets turned into a little comic moment.

It was a lovely fun time and if you’re looking for a fun puzzle game that involves running around virtually digging in the dirt, then you should play Fossil Hunters.

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