Your Robot Best Friend

Your Robot Best Friend is a game where you play as a small robot that is trying to gather some parts to fix up their friends. The game seems to take place in a workshop. There seems to only really be 3 parts of the workshop to explore but as the player gathers more parts and fix more of the robot friends, they are able to access more parts of the workshop. The game finishes when the player collects all the parts and rebuilds all of their robot friends.

The gameplay is the robot character walking around the workshop and collecting items. The player is able to interact with items that are highlighted in white. After collecting a specific item, they are able to bring it back to a person able to rebuild the friends. At first the player is only able to really collect items on the ground. Other items are shown to be up high and are said to be out of the player’s reach. When the player collects the parts to build the first friend, the player is then able to progress. With the help of the friend, the player is able to reach some higher areas to collect more parts. Also as more parts are collected and friends are built, the player is able to interact with more objects and progress through the story. One of the events that happens is that the cat will be able to tell the player the combination of a lock. Once all the parts are collected and the robot friends are built, all the characters will celebrate and the game will be finished.

The controls are simple as they are only the arrow controls. Walking towards an object will interact with it. Since interactable objects are white, they stand out from the background and are obvious to the player if they are interactable. The sprite work for the game is well done. Even though only 2 colors are used for most of the sprites, the tiles convey the scenery well. Objects are drawn well enough to be recognized and the background is not confusing to walk through. The small details in the background and sprites help set the scene and make the game more interesting. The game is also drawn with depth. It is not just a flat space the player walks through and each room looks like a room with three dimensional depth. Even through color limitations, the game is able to showcase a well drawn scenario. Even with the simple art style, there are a lot of details with the backgrounds and sprites. The other characters also provide understandable objectives and create a lively environment. The other robots in the game are allies to the player and help them with their objectives.

The game, “Your Robot Best Friend” is a neat game that is charming. The characters and dialog create nice interactions and make for a nice game. The artwork is drawn well and creates clear and simple visuals that enhance the engagement of the game.

This game does a great job conveying a purpose of exploration throughout the gameplay. As a background for playing the game, there is even an animation to show some personality for some of the characters before jumping into the game. This animation adds a lot to the game before going in and playing since we’re able to connect with the characters much more during gameplay. It acts as somewhat of a cutscene before heading into the gameplay. I love cutscenes in games I play today, so this was a pleasant surprise before heading into the world to explore. Once places into the game, I felt like I could explore anywhere in the workshop. Being able to immediately go between three different screens gave me a sense of exploration and freedom that I didn’t think I could have in such a simple game tool. On top of the exploration of the room, there were many items and locations I was able to interact with and get a feel for the tone of the workshop. A lot of the text displayed when interacting with different objects was extremely unique and helped me dive deeper into the world, I was placed in. Playing as a robot that the workshop master created fit the experience of the game well, since I felt a sense of belonging and importance throughout my time in the game. Once you start interacting with the world is when it really starts to open. There is a specific order that you’re supposed to interact with the items in the world, but it doesn’t truly feel like it at all. Whenever you interact with an object, it hints to you that you must do before being able to properly deal with the issue of that item not being able to be used. This means you are free to explore and use the knowledge gained while exploring to think about how to beat the game as you go. As you explore and complete different item quests, more parts of the world open to interact with and explore the different dialogue. When different items become interactable, the workshop owner also has different dialogue options and even begins to create new robots for the player to interact with and overcome new obstacles. Using new NPCs that are like the player character to overcome new obstacles helps the world feel more open to explore. It’s like unlocking new abilities in games that allow the player to traverse to new areas of the world. The flow of interacting with new items and using those items to discover new areas of the map was addicting and kept me playing until the very end of the game. I was invested in the characters and the story of the robots and workshop owner throughout the entire game time. Though bitsy seems like a simple tool on the surface, this game dives deep into its systems and artistic design. Exploration plays a huge role in this game, which kept me invested and excited to explore and interact with various parts of the world during gameplay. 

“Your Robot Best Friend” is a story based game about a robot on a mission to rebuild his robot friends. The robot walks around a home searching for different objects that the creator will then use to rebuild his friends. The designer used Bitsy to create 3 effectively designed rooms to explore, and lots of detail in the blocks that make up the walls and other areas that cannot be walked on. There are doors on the back wall of two of the rooms, but they are just for decoration and cannot be entered. The entirety of the game space is not too large, but the designer gives reasons to revisit each room multiple times to maximize this space, so a larger space is really not necessary. The three rooms are organized side by side, such that exiting to the right of the center room leads to entering at the left of the right room. This gives the impression of the rooms being adjacent in space, even though Bitsy doesn’t actually have any concept of how rooms are organized in space. There are also transitions in time where the game zooms in and out of the same room, signaling the creator building a new robot. At the end of these transitions, you are still in the room with the creator, but there is also another robot in there with you. Clever block designs give the feeling of each room being one complete image rather than a collection of blocks. This is something that I remember struggling with in my Bitsy game, but the designer managed it here. Intractable blocks are marked by including some white in the block. This is the only use of white in the entirety of the game. The color choice of a palette of lavenders gives the game an appealing appearance that also matches the wholesome story of a robot helping to rebuild his friends. None of the colors are too harshly contrasted, but their differences are still visible. Text is used by each intractable object, and is sometimes more useful than others. This encourages players to interact with everything possible in a room. Additionally, as someone who usually skips through text in games, the text here was concise and meaningful enough to keep me actually reading it throughout my playthrough. Text that was not useful for progression previously can change to useful text later. For example, the cat originally just meows at you, but helps you progress in the game later. The creator talks differently from the cat, and interacting with objects results in the robot Jeremy talking to himself. The primary verbs that I noticed in the game are walk, talk and examine. Walk is the first verb noticed because you cannot get anywhere without walking around and between rooms. There are some characters to talk to, like the cat and the creator. These cover the talking in the game. Otherwise, objects that are intractable seem like they are being examined more than anything, to check if they can be useful to the player at that time.