Indigo 7: Quest For Love Review

Developed and published by Dolores Entertainment, Indigo 7: Quest for Love is a quirky puzzler with a considerable nod to Scott Pilgrim. I say this as the character design and the storyline does feel like a sub-story from the Scott Pilgrim universe. The background music of the game has some decent tracks which you find yourself humming along to. The sound bytes of the players, not so much, they are quite limited and repetitive after a while. There is a strong emphasis on teenage love as well as epiphanies on improving their personalities. Does the puzzling element match up to the cartoonish comic-style storyline?

You follow the main character Nathan as he suffers a break-up from a girl called girlfriend 32, who states she hates his music, leaving him heartbroken. He is the lead singer of the band that he travels with and each of the members are quite quirky and at times, you are not even sure they are friends. To cheer him up one of the band says they should visit their family by the beach which rouses Nathan who thinks he could find his new love there. But will his search to find the love of his life end well or does he and the rest of the band need to reflect on themselves to make themselves better people before looking for love?

The gameplay itself although is simple enough is very hard to explain. It can be likened to Puyo Puyo or Dr. Robotniks Mean Bean Machine, but it is still different which is refreshing. You start with a grid of different coloured hexagons and the idea is to change all the hexagons to a single colour. You start from one end of the grid – usually the bottom left – and your starting hexagon is usually touching 1 or 2 colours. You then pick the colour you want to connect to and all the hexagons of that colour that are touching your starting hexagon or touching the hexagon of that same colour will gain a face like they have been claimed. Then you have to decide from all the hexagons you have now claimed that will be touching others which colour will you be able to claim the most with. Sometimes it’s better to convert the colours that have tendrils into the other areas of the grid over converting a big group of the same colour in the same area. Once you have converted all the hexagons to a single colour the game is won. However, there are many variations and stipulations to the game to try and keep it interesting.

On some levels, you are in a race against time so you have to choose quickly. But on some levels, you only have a certain number of moves so you have to think strategically. There are also times when you are on a time limit and have limited moves so you need to think smart and fast. Those are just single play styles and there are a couple of multiplayer styles too. You have standard conquest versus mode where you have to battle others in a race against time and often with limited moves to covert your board to a single colour first. A territory conquest mode where you and up to 3 others share a big board in each of the corners and you have to convert the most hexagons to win.

There are about 32 episodes in the main adventure mode with the story played out in a virtual comic, and you playing a game variation in between. There is no difficulty setting here and some of the levels are quite tricky to progress from. It also doesn’t help that the hexagons are randomised every time. So even if you think you knew where you went wrong last time, the next playing field will be completely different, so I think there is a strong element of luck involved. I also had a blip on a couple of levels where although it said I won the adventure didn’t continue and I had to replay the level again to progress. Weirdly on my thrid time of completing the level, I could progress the story and it was almost like I needed to win more convincingly to progress even though that wasn’t stated anywhere.

The game does offer a small dose of longevity by having a multiplayer mode to see who is the better in the various modes it has to offer. But it is only couch multiplayer, so even if you did encourage a buddy to play this with you it would only be whilst they were paying a visit. You can play single player against the CPU but you’re better off sticking to the story mode if that’s the way you’re going to play.

Conclusion

Indigo 7 : Quest For Love is quite a clever and refreshing strategy puzzler. It’s a new concept for me as I haven’t seen it done similarly and the Scott Pilgrim like graphics are always interesting and appealing. Although not many of the characters in the story are likeable or relatable, it is still fun to play through the story mode and watch how things unfold. I think they either needed to remove the character soundbites or add a lot more as they did get irritating after a while and I will be forever haunted by Guile saying ‘Magic fingers’.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.