Quick Review: Girls Like Robots

I already covered this one a tiny bit late last year during my Missed Year Plans. Time to go in depth.

I'm more wondering why they're grouping together
right there, on the soccer - excuse me, chickenball - field.

Created by Popcannibal and released on February 14th, 2014 (fun date for the concept), Girls Like Robots is a puzzle game in which all the characters are square heads that must fit into various grids and situations. Plenty of students at that school: The titular Girl, the Nerd, the fan of bugs, and so on. The titular robots are here, too. The concept is that these squares have positive and negative opinions of each other, and it’s up to you to sort them into the grids to reach maximal happiness for everyone.

One of the stranger puzzles in the game, where you have to
set characters to block the one guy who's moving around
all happily.

Girls like to be next to robots – and robots like to be next to girls, too, but they cannot handle being surrounded by four girls. Nerds enjoy robots too, but robots are indifferent to them; nerds specifically like occupying the corners of a level’s field, they also like to be next to girls (while girls don’t really like them). Nerds also don’t like to be too many close to each other. June, another square character, is a loner; she doesn’t really care having people next to her, but she loves being next to bugs. Speaking of, bugs on the field will move to empty squares away from other characters you place. Every human likes pie, so you can place a pie among angry people to make them happy! Except robots. They’re the only ones who hate pie. Also, no one likes to be placed on a burning square.

Swapping characters around an already-filled grid,
instead of placing them yourself. More complexities!

It gets weirder by Act 2, with part of it happening on a farm. Cows will release their milk if surrounded by angry people, so for once, the goal isn’t to make everyone happy, but the opposite. Cow milk can douse fires, too. We have new robots with mustaches; they have a grudge with June and hate to be next to her, and she returns the sentiment. And then, there’s fish; they hate being in corners, love being next to each other, and like being next to anyone, but nobody else cares about them. If that’s starting to sound weird, wait till you reach Act 3 and aliens are involved…

Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed.

Yup, they're in space now. It's just something that can
happen in Square Head Land.

There are multiple switches of gameplay, and you might not always know what comes next. Most of the time, you can place anyone anywhere, but other times you don’t get to choose in which order you place the characters; or maybe you can only place them right next to other squares that were already placed. Or maybe the level makes you swap squares around already-filled grids, figuring out where to best place everyone for maximum happiness. Or what about levels where the goal is to stay as close to an even amount of happy and unhappy? Puzzle levels are divided into chapters within each act, so that mechanics and alterations to gameplay can be kept in their own little area.

Some of the bonus mini-games are pretty fun.

This puzzle game is a great example of starting off with a very simple concept and expanding it over time, throwing new curveballs occasionally to surprise players. Every level has different requirements for bronze, silver and gold medals. You can move on to the next level as soon as you get bronze; however, you might want to go for better scores, since each medal (thus, up to 3 per level) grants new points that are added to a "Bag of Happy". At certain Bag thresholds, you unlock new Bonuses, which can be new challenges that either ask you to go for the highest possible score, or special gameplay modes. There’s a comical tone to the presentation the whole way through – especially the narration’s witty comments between levels.

Girls Like Robots is available on Steam for 6.99$ USD.