Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Toca Boo


Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and it is at its very best when you see children having fun with it.  As a kid I loved dressing up in costumes, loved candy and loved spooks, ghouls and scary stories.  When you’re in the safety of your own home, with the lights out and a roaring fire (preferably in the fireplace), who doesn’t love sharing a spine-chilling tale, or watching Boris Karloff lurch about on TV?  These are the sort of holiday moments that I look forward to sharing with my own children, the first of which is already on her way.  Perhaps that’s what drew me to Toca Boo…or, it may just be that I’m still a kid inside and I couldn’t resist the cute icon that popped into the App Store’s “Best New Apps” section this week.  But whatever the reason and given the season I had to give Toca Boo a try.


As an adult gamer, I’m certainly not the target audience.  Toca Boca, the game’s developer, specializes in “digital toys” for young children, defining the term as a game with few rules.  In essence, their products are designed to be simple, imaginative, and fun for little kids to play around with.  Toca Boo, however, proved fun for myself, and I’ve no shame in admitting it.


Released on Oct. 23, 2014, it’s definitely the perfect season for a spooky-themed game like this, although I haven’t found anything explicitly Halloween in the time I’ve spent with the app.  Rather than tying itself directly to the holiday, it instead finds its theme in the broader realm of spooks and scares, and thus invites play any day (or night) you feel the inclination.


The premise of the game is simple: you play as a young child who dresses as a ghost using a white sheet.  In the rules of the game, much like any child’s imagination, this means you get to float about the room as a ghost rather than being confined to the floor.  Your objective will be familiar to anyone who grew up with a brother or a sister: find a place to hide, and scare the living daylights out of anyone who comes close.


The gameplay and controls are also simple and intuitive.  Touch your adorable ghost avatar and drag your finger, and he will float about to follow it.  Find a nook or cranny and he’ll tuck himself in.  There are also blue-tinted areas, openings to boxes or the covers of a bed that you can tab on to have him hide.  Most rooms also contain red tinted areas that can be tapped, and these will do things such as turn on and off lights, set off alarm clocks or turn on and off radios.  Tapping these things to switch them on and off while one of your “victims” is near will start them sweating before you ever spring up behind them and will lead to bigger, more satisfying scares.


The house is three stories and you can freely move from room to room.  There are several family members to sneak up on, from an old stilt-legged grandpa, twins co-joined at the elbow, even a headless dog (come to think of it, why would this family be scared of you wearing a bedsheet?)  The house is always dark (rooms which give you a peak outside reveals that it is a dark and stormy night) so characters walk about with lanterns, candles and flashlights.  There are room lights, but they do very little to brighten up this Adam’s Family home and are mostly there to switch on and off and spook people out.  It’s fun to see the reactions you can get by scaring people in different ways.  Manage to get someone worked up enough before you jump, and you can have them flat on their back one moment, then racing out of the room the next (you can give chase if you like).


The game is a toy in that it is completely open-ended.  No score, no objective beyond amusing yourself.  You will be caught and scolded by the other characters if you fail to sneak around carefully enough, ruining a chance at a scare, but you can always set the stage for them again so there’s no real penalty.  It’s all just for laughs, and the charming graphics, the personalities of each character, the amusing sound effects and the whole “jump out and scare people” theme keep it fun.


If it were a free title I’d say download it and enjoy a few moments of silly, childlike amusement, but as it stands, it carries a $2.99 price tag on the app store.  On the other hand, the game is ad-free (with the exception of button on the title page for another Toca Boca title that was recently made free), intended as a title for young children, and once you’ve started the game there appears to be no way to exit it short of punching the Home button.  It’s clean, kid-friendly and well-designed for its target audience.  As such, if you have young children and you let them play with apps on your iOS device, I’d say it is worth the price tag for something so well designed that you can feel reasonably comfortable letting them play without worrying if they’re going to click the wrong thing and pull up your web browser or make purchases.  It’s good, clean fun and I recommend it.

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