Meet Me At Noon (MMAN) logic puzzle game with some mechanics of a pusher or Sokoban style of game, but with programing mechanics in the vein of Magnum Opus. The title is a bit deceptive, meeting at noon really doesn’t fit the goal of each level. Rather, “put me in my correct end position” is a more apt way of describing the game, however, that doesn’t sound like much of a title. The player plays two halves of a time glass, one represents day, the other night. The goal is to move the pieces in such a way that at the end of the moves, both pieces end up in their correct location; a sun and a moon symbol. There are a couple of key mechanics that make this difficult. One is that the sun piece will be moved, then replay the moves time-reversed. The moon piece will then be moved and often relies on the time-reversed moves of the sun piece to get to the correct end position. To complete a puzzle, both pieces must end up on their respective symbols (a sun and a moon).
MMAN has the usual sound options and a few graphics options. Chiefly, the ability to turn down the music and setting the graphics resolution are the only important options. There are also options for post rendering effects being high or low, windowed mode, grid display, and fast movement. MMAN is played using a controller or keyboard, and unfortunately, there isn’t an option to turn controllers off. A joystick, throttle, or rudder pedals will cause the game to go haywire unless they are all neutralized. There is no key remapping option, but the game works well using the arrow keys on the keyboard.
MMAN’s mechanics are fairly novel, not many games have time-reversed moves. It isn’t easy to grasp, but trial and error will usually overcome the more complex puzzles. The rules are fairly simple, however, many are discovered rather than explained. For example, falling off the side, or being crushed. It is never explained that a piece can be crushed by another piece. Often these things happen during a trial-and-error series of moves and backtracking to solve a particularly complex puzzle. Some of the puzzles look simple, with a small playing field, yet are complex enough to take quite a bit of time to dissect. The key to understanding MMAN is planning for the time-reversed moves of the sun piece to synchronize perfectly with the moves needed for the moon piece. This often involves counter intuitive thought.
Some of the mechanics in MMAN are confusing and often a puzzle will be solved by pure chance without really comprehending the “why”. MMAN’s puzzles seem to have more than one way to be solved, however, there is a gold star on each level, and it’s possible that there is only one way to capture the gold star and solve the puzzle. The game keeps track of gold star solved puzzles and silver (which just means solved). There appears to be 105 total levels and these are broken up into chapters. The first two chapters are not too difficult, however a few of the puzzles in them are tricky. Later chapters feature not only tricky level designs, but also splits up the sun and moon moves into multiple segments, which ramps up the complexity in many cases. Meet Me At Noon is a very well made game, with a professional looks and feel and is recommended for any gamer that enjoys puzzle games.
Purchase Meet Me At Noon on Steam!
Jacmac is an ancient gamer that loves open world, strategy, FPS, and tactical sims, but will play almost anything.
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