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Erika: 7

The story begins with our young hero, Anka, whose goal is to free his mother from a crime she did not commit and find his missing father. In between this story, players are asked to solve brainteasers in order to progress through the game. Simple enough, but what this adventure-puzzle game lacks is focus. The need to repeatedly visit people and locations in order to gain certain items throughout the game adds to more frustrations. Despite there being some good ideas, Anka takes a lot of missteps in gameplay. You’re better off simply playing the demo.

Sam: 5
Anka is an adventure game. You control a young boy doing everyday chores, like finding the door handle that you tore off and threw on the roof, or finding the 40 eggs you hid in and around the house. These Basic tasks require mini-games. Want to read a recipe? Solve a crossword puzzle. The other tasks are more like traditional adventure game puzzles. They involve a lot of pixel hunting and combining unlikely objects. Trying to fix a hole in a boat? Use a frog, a broken bottle of honey, and bees. The puzzles range from obvious to illogical. However, the environments are detailed, and none of the items are too hidden.

Peter: 3
Anka is a point-and-click puzzler with well-drawn, anime-style characters and various minigames. The first thing I had to do was search the pixels for 40 eggs, which was frustrating and boring. Then I did a tile puzzle and a word search. While the art is well-executed, neither it nor the puzzles offer anything new or challenging. It seems like the target audience is children who can’t handle simple game mechanics, and I guess there is some appeal in that.

Stew: 8
In spite of myself, I liked Anka. A sickly sweet tale of a chipper lad occupying an equally honey toned world, it’s the sort of game that would usually make me puke. That said, at its core Anka is less about some brat’s “adventures” and more about playing mini-games and solving puzzles. The mini-games especially impressed me. While none are especially groundbreaking or complex, they are all fun and well done. I could actually imagine several being sold as standalone products and to its credit, Anka has them all under one roof, available for play whenever you like. In short, Anka is an attractive package for casual gamers, if you can get past the Care Bears sentimentality.

Stew: 5
Vitamini’s website describes it as “Tetris with physics.” That’s giving it a bit too much credit. The core mechanic of the game can be described as bashing floating, spinning blocks into one another. The closest visible resemblance to Tetris is that blocks fall from the top of the screen and land on the bottom. After half an hour of play time, I had no clue what I was doing beyond the basic controls. That said, I can’t say the game is without any entertainment value. The rudimentary thrill of knocking things around is fun for a bit. While there are hints of a good game here, the current product is just mediocre.

Peter: 4
This is relaxing and stylish, and the way the sound effects mesh with the music is cool, but I don’t really see the point to Vitamini. There’s no tension and no fear of losing. I played for a while, wondering when the challenge would come, but it never did. I even had a hard time getting to a game over screen. My blocks kept disappearing, whether I wanted them to or not.

Erika: 8
Three words can sum up this this puzzle game: Tetris with physics. Not to say that Vitamini is a straight-up Tetris clone, but the premise itself hints at this despite the developer’s desire to create a unique puzzle title. However what makes this game shine is the ability to dictate the pace of the game, and thus manipulate the level of difficulty to further customize the experience. This casual puzzle game is, indeed, relaxing and definitely worth the $2 asking price.

Sam: 4
Vitamini is a game where you match colored blocks as they fall and bounce around. You can control the most recent one that dropped to try and match colors, but this seems pretty optional. I had more success holding down the Space bar and letting block clusters shower down rather than trying to herd them where I wanted. They seemed to match themselves without my help, so it got bored pretty quickly. The game calls itself the easiest ever, but it’s barely a game. Make colorful blocks fall down, move them around if you want, score points. It’s certainly colorful, but that’s about it.

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