by I just spent the last half hour dressing up a little girl and trying to get birds to poop on her. I’m going to jail aren’t I?
I’ve actually been trying to get this one to work for a while, but have been too frustrated to make any progress. For whatever reason, my gaming PC (well laptop) which so far has been able to run any game I put into it on max settings, could not seem to power through this mobile to PC port with higher than single digit FPS. The fix was actually quite simple, but dredging up the mental energy and fortitude to pursue the fix was something I lacked until now. On the unlikely off-chance that you too are experiencing the same problems, simply open up your BaseEngine.ini file and implement the following changes I found on one of the Steam forum posts:
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE to FALSE
ImageReflectionTextureSize=1024 to 2048
TerrainMaterialMaxTextureCount=16 to 32
TerrainTessellationCheckDistance=4096.0 to “1024.0”
Ran perfectly fine after that.
Lili: Child of Geos is a pretty awesome game. Immediately noticeable are the visuals. There’s a fine line between “cartoony good” and “cartoony awful.” L:CG might actually be “cartoony awesome.” The world is bright and large and fun to to look at. Large stone walkways, distant soft waves, lush tropical plants–it all sort of makes you wish you could actually go there, sprawl out on the soft grass and stare at the sky for a couple hours, listening to the sea. The characters are all great too–uniquely designed, delightfully animated and wonderfully quirky–they also have the same wonderful cartoony nature of the environments.
The world is incredibly kid-friendly. It’s safe and soft around the edges but not in a stupid cheap way; its consistent, makes sense within the world’s lore and isn’t used as a underhanded way to deliver constant PSAs or political viewpoints to a younger more gullible audience. It’s just a non-violent world and this is one of the rare occasions where I’m completely okay with that because it’s very well done. The world doesn’t need to be violent because there’s meaningful tasks to complete outside of the normal means of video-game conflict. The setting doesn’t need to be serious because the characters and their quirky interactions are more than entertaining enough to make me want to explore and see more of it.
It’s also pretty hard not to crush on Lili a bit. She’s freaking adorable. And yes, you can get birds to poop on her… but I’m a bit of a tie-die fanatic and the birds on the Island happen to poop rainbow die. I’m can’t make this up.
You may have noticed I’m wearing a mask there and that’s because you are rewarded with them after “defeating” the spirits on the island in “combat.” As the story goes, the island is filled with constructs that, while generally good natured, are unhappy to be constantly under the command of their creators–the spirits. They’re also kind of jerks.
Your job, both to finish your school paper as well as helping the island inhabitants, is to leap on the backs of the spirits and… pick their flowers. It’s a bit button-mashy but it’s more fun than you might think.
Honestly, this game is great. The only reason for me putting it in Tier 2 is that it’s just a bit on the simple side. Clearly this was intentional and simple is not a bad thing on its own but the largest appeal to the game seems to be pleasantly walking around a beautiful world, hunting down spirits and dressing up Lili, which in the end is technically just fluff. It’s very nice fluff and very cheery fluff but player interaction here is more or less reserved for “walk here, hit this button, mash buttons on a spirit.” Classic hand-eye-coordination (with a bit of an scavenger hunt motif thrown in via the treasure chests around the island) but little else from a mechanical standpoint. Even so, this game comes heavily recommended.
