On the Peril of Parrots is a Hamiltonian Path puzzle game; the goal, at least at the surface level, is to find a path through a tiled room that does not overlap. Recently, I had finished Blobun, another Hamiltonian Path game, and decided to come back to finish this one for comparison. And, long story short, the only-slightly-more-expensive game starring a lesbian rabbit-slime does everything so, so much better.
Story-wise, this game is lacking. There's a narrative about programmers testing an AI after making it scrape the data of creative people off the internet that feels painfully relevant to modern-day political issues, but I can't be too upset because it's only told at intervals between sets of levels, usually consists of just three to six dialogue boxes of people talking, and doesn't really go into any depth farther than "corporations only care about what makes them money, and the right thing is to destroy something you don't understand before people in power try to abuse it for personal gain". It also feels like the game's title barely fits, as the only connection programming has to perilous parrots is that the AI in question is named P.O.L.L.I., as in "Polly want a cracker?" And unlike a cracker, this all just feels half-baked at best.
Graphics-wise, this game is lacking. The levels are mostly white and black (or at least near-equivalents as viewed through a fake green-tinted, retro computer monitor), with a trail of green, red, or blue denoting the path you've already taken. The symbols for the new puzzle elements, like the frog and paint brush, are easy to identify and decently detailed. The conversation segments are nicer to look at, but are no more visually interesting than posts in an online forum; just a picture of the speaker and a lot of text. All in all, it's not garish, but since I'm directly comparing it to a game that was colorful and creative every step of the way, just adequate is not enough.
Gameplay-wise, this game STARTED fine, then BECAME lacking. As a puzzle-lover, I genuinely thought that the game's first chapter was fun. I enjoyed new components as they were introduced, like frogs that make you skip over a space and bombs that explode and color the spaces around them when a switch is pressed. However, I was intentionally handicapping myself; there's one mandatory unsolvable portion that unlocks a "Debug" feature you need to progress, but after that, I was able to solve all of the random puzzles I was given without using it afterwards. And then...Chapter 2 happened. I tried to solve things fairly just like in Chapter 1, but no, the "Debug" feature is now mandatory to progress the story. Plus, despite the game advertising "100+" puzzle layouts, I somehow got a repeat...no, not a repeat from Chapter 1, I mean the RNG decided to give me the same puzzle layout twice in the same chapter. And then after that, why even bother to do anything but (in-game) cheat your way through the rest of the game? Maybe it ties into that AI narrative, where the true sign of dangerous intelligence is manipulating the rules themselves instead of doing the most efficient job possible while constrained to them, but it ironically gave me the inverse reaction of feeling on-par with the lowest common denominator.
What else...ah, there's also still some bugs in this game. If I exit to the Title Screen and then immediately jump back in, P.O.L.L.I.'s movement is locked in one direction until I open and close the ESC menu. And sometimes, not consistently, mashing a direction too fast makes P.O.L.L.I. skip a space entirely, requiring a redo of the whole puzzle. At least, at the time of this review, the developers are still working hard to perfect things rather than abandon the project and profit from what's already been done.
In conclusion, this predicament of puzzling programmed parrot peril that I've perused is possible, but not, in my opinion, passable. If you like puzzles, you might enjoy the first part, only to get bored before the story's finished and you unlock Free Play mode. If you don't like puzzles, the game's designed so you're avoiding most of the puzzles anyways, but the story likely isn't enough of a hook to keep you interested. And if you like achievement hunting...well, there's four achievements, one per chapter and one for unlocking the Debug mode, all obtainable in less than two hours, so at least there's that.
