Doodle God

From Zanecorpwiki

The idea is simple: combine two things to make a third. Fire + Water = Steam (hope that's not a spoiler for anyone).

Great concept, and works at first, but the problem is it breaks down fast. Obvious combinations don't work. And, there are a couple spoilers ahead, but out of the roughly 250 combinations in the game, the few I discuss won't change anything.

What does and does not work ends up being completely arbitrary. "car" + "air" = "airplane", but why not "car" + "feather" or "car" + "bird"? Plus, there's so much that's missing. Vaccines were developed from cow pox (vacca means cow), but "domestic animal" (represented by a cow) fails to combine with either "scientist" or "medicine". Many flus com from domestic animals (and recently birds it seems), but combining these with "human" yields no results.

The game works early on when many things combine. That's the way it is in the real world. But after you've played awhile and you've got 150 things and so many of them should combine, but so few do, you start realizing just how much is missing.

What does and doesn't work becomes completely arbitrary and for every success, you go through dozens of things that could have worked just as well but didn't. It's impossible to predict, there's no pattern; and without a pattern, you don't have a game, you just have a bunch of stuff to click.