Recommendation: This Precious Land

Freeware game recommendation of the day: “This Precious Land.”


I spent two hours trying to figure out the puzzle aspect of “This Precious Land,” then another hour figuring out the goals – all told, I played for a full 3/48th of the time Craig Forrester had to code and design it.

“Precious” was made for the 48-hour Ludum Dare Jam, and to fit that time frame, Forrester cut out any fat. That includes the instructions: Start the game, and you’ll face an empty isometric grid and be told that left-click is to place, right-click is to harvest. Everything else you’ll have to learn in the sandbox.

The main mechanic is matching tiles on the grid like “Bejeweled,” which collapses them into a single higher-level tile. When I started playing, I didn’t know how the different tiles fit together, but I still enjoyed the kinetics of sliding tiles around and planning chains of tiles. The right word for this is “whimsy,” like watching Aardman claymation, because it’s a simple pleasure to tinker with the landscape, throwing down dirt tiles and matching them to make forests. Like if you condensed the Minecraft experience and made it much, much less painful to start a new world.

After I got the hang of it, the game’s endgame – an odd word for such a small game – unfolded, and I took more time with my moves, and even had to play at resource management. The game always felt fair, and when I ultimately fell short of the goal, it was because I wasn’t good enough at the puzzle thinking. It definitely brought out the best in my thinking, though, even more so than Bejeweled does.

I definitely recommend “This Precious Land.” Sit down and play around with it like a kid putting together a computer for the first time: It’s there to be tinkered with, sliding this here and slotting that in, and it all works perfectly when you start it up.


[All credit to RPS and IndieGames.com for featuring this game and convincing me to download it.]