Milo’s Quest (PC)
Milo’s Quest is a top-down puzzle game where a cute dog pushes blocks around to solve puzzles… or maybe, Milo’s Quest is a top-down action game about attacking cute ghosts to open the path onward… or maybe, if you like, Milo’s Quest is both of those at once!
Milo’s Quest let’s you pick right out of the gate what kind of adventure you want to go on. The full game version is of course the mix of puzzles and action, Milo needing to both arrange blocks properly on switches and defeat all the ghosts in the area to open the right gates. However, if you want something simple, you can set it to Adventure Only, the gates you used to have to open with block-pushing now immediately open when you enter an area. The inverse is Puzzle Only, where you find the gates opened by the simple combat are now the ones that are automatically opened up. Considering the game’s puppy protagonist is likely its biggest draw, this could help younger player find the best way to play the game for them, but Milo’s Quest does definitely feel a little uneven if you only focus on one side of the gameplay.
Milo’s breezy little journey kicks off one day when he finds a glowing green bone and accidentally unleashes the evil King Old Skull, the floating head sending his ghosts out to conquer the world. Milo immediately sets about trying to set things right, traveling through areas that line up with the four seasons as he needs to defeat some of the bony overlord’s bigger henchmen to get to him. Most of your adventuring involves entering a new area and opening whatever gates are preventing progress, some blocking treasure chests or helpful items like the keys needed to get to the most important areas or to optional goodies.
When it comes to the action side of the game, the ghost enemies are all pretty simple, starting off with ones who mostly just bumble about before more aggressive ones enter the picture and soon wizard ones try to fire on you as you approach. As a simple little doggy, your only attack option is a charging tackle, and unfortunately there are some growing pains in mastering this seemingly simple maneuver. Ghosts damage you on contact normally, and while your charge tackle will override that as it deals damage, the moment the ghost is injured it is now able to injure you. This mean if the ghost is still touching you after the damage, you will be hurt. This small issue can come up if a ghost is near a wall and thus can’t be bounced back far enough to get out of your path. In tighter spaces this will crop up as a hard to avoid problem, but once it becomes a known issue, you can adjust the space of your charges or lure ghosts to overcome this annoying quirk of the game’s design. Pretty much by the time you face the first boss you should have the attack figured out well enough for it not to be as much of a problem anymore, and luckily, the big boss creatures accommodate your attack method so you won’t find yourself stuck up against them and losing health in the fights where death is actually a bit more of a concern.
Notably, neither puzzles nor ghosts disappear from the game when you’re playing the different modes, they are just prioritized less, so death is still a concern no matter which way you play. However, save for the unlockable Hardcore mode, death doesn’t really set you back much. In Normal mode, you’ll respawn at the room you were in, the price for death being Milo losing a bunch of bones he has collected on his adventure. Many bushes can be passed through to potentially reveal bones, and treasure chests will often contain them as well, this working as a currency that usually goes towards buying health or stamina upgrades. Health upgrades give you another heart to weather hits with, but the stamina bars tie to your dash, the game limiting Milo’s tackles so he can’t just instantly end a boss monster with rapid fire tackles. The amount of bones lost on death is considerable and the goodies you spend them on often ask for a hefty 50 bones, but you can always slowly collect them by reentering rooms and rooting through bushes if you really must have the upgrades.
The puzzles of Milo’s Quest are all block pushing puzzles where you need to get every large block in the area onto a button. You need to hold a button to push them so thankfully you won’t accidentally shove them while fighting ghosts, but Milo cannot pull them, meaning much of the challenge in placing them right is making sure you can maneuver them to all their destinations without getting them stuck. If you mess up you can leave and reenter the area to reset them though, so they’re often low pressure affairs. Things do start fairly simple, but as you progress they do up their complexity a fair bit, never getting too difficult and serving as the more involved counterbalance to dashing the dog into the enemy ghosts. None of them have any gimmickry to them though, the design purely stemming from block pushing and switch placement in relation to walls and other simple obstructions.
This is where we reach how the game is best played in its combined mode. The ghost combat is too simple to really motivate you to play through the admittedly very short adventure, but going from room to room with only block pushing to worry about gets a little stale. These options are appreciated and certain players might just be better off playing them, but without the two complementing each other, their fairly basic design becomes a bit too repetitive to stomach. Together though, you need to keep going from one to the other to open the gates, and by keeping you bouncing between the two by necessity, neither gets the focus long enough to wear out their welcome. Milo’s Quest is still very simple and short so neither could truly become unbearably samey, but that also means neither ever pushes beyond the few small concepts that get reshuffled in each new room you enter.
THE VERDICT: Milo’s Quest is a brisk little journey whose main appeal is its cuteness, and its character design and pixel art locations ensure that is delivered on even if there’s not much to the adventure. Being able to choose the game’s genre is a nifty feature, but the game is best played in the combined mode despite the fact the puzzles and ghost fighting action never get so complex that they ever become more than okay. Milo’s Quest is far too plain if you remove one half of its gameplay, but going between fighting and pushing blocks on a regular basis means this breezy little adventure is a fine way to spend a small bit of time even if it’s rather unexceptional.
And so, I give Milo’s Quest for PC…
An OKAY rating. Milo’s Quest is a plain but pleasant little title that doesn’t ask much from you but doesn’t give back much in return either. Most of what the game offers is seen in the first area and it does about all it wants to by the time the two to three hour experience wraps up, so besides the little issues with the dash attack, Milo’s Quest ends up a fine but rather basic adventure. In the mixed mode, it provides enough that it doesn’t grow stale, but the fact neither the combat or the puzzles are hearty enough to really carry things well on their own is sort of telling for what kind of adventure it truly is. Milo’s Quest falls pretty squarely into the kind of snack-style gaming where it’s fine to pick up and play for a bit if you want something small that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into, but it doesn’t provide much that would make you want to go out of your way to get it.
As said before, Milo’s Quest main appeal seems to be the adorable pup you play as, and while it doesn’t do much with its cuteness either beyond a baseline of appealing pixel art design, a decent baseline is how most of the experience could be described. If some gimmick came in and shook things up Milo’s Quest could maybe keep going and start to find more of an identity, but it’s just a plain and inoffensive little title that can mildly amuse when you’re looking to kill time but not much more.