The best one is The Watchmaker – l’hologerie, a retheming of the old Percolator game. Stop the ticking clocks in the green, pulling the lever after each one to move the key around the grand clock and make it accessible at midnight, with the clear difficulty of a fast-moving spinning floor. Decently challenging game, plenty of opportunities for comedy pratfalls, I really like its room theming and lighting. Nice.
The worst one is the Pirate Planks – Planches de Pirate and this is a shame because they’ve really gone to town with the theming of the room, a big pirate ship but they’ve concentrated so much on The Funny Thing they’ve made the game practically impossible, and when no contestants make any sort of progress The Funny Thing loses a lot of its lustre. In tonight’s episode each plank has a “red zone” near the wall will disqualified the contestant if they go into it – I don’t know if it was added to stop people going up against the wall, or if they filmed it first and realised the game is not doable unless you let them go to the wall.
I can’t say I’m a fan of games where the main reason you win or lose is “a man off camera pushes a button at their whim” – I’m old skool and remember when the games were *mechanically* clever. Overall, now we’re halfway through this year’s run and it’s felt like a 7/10 season, but fingers crossed we get Season 35 next year and they might have some interesting ways to celebrate.
As I mentioned on the dcord, I’m not big on Planks just out of a sheer Health & Safety standpoint. It just looks badly designed, and a serious injury waiting to happen.
That said, I wonder how much more playable the game might have been if it weren’t for the rope ladder. People seem to be struggling just as much with that as anything, so it at least seems possible that the game would be more playable if they at least got to start on a steady platform to jump from.
And deeper water.