Not Not – A Brain Buster

Genre: Mental Exercise

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Included in Tiny Lands & Not Not – A Brain Buster, along with Tiny Lands.)

Not Not is a “Mental Exercise” style game in the same vein as games like Brain Age. In it, your character stands atop a cube with an instruction printed on its face and four white or colored places to move to on each side. All you need to do is follow the instruction by moving the character up, down, left, right, or staying still within the span of a few seconds on a ticking timer. Respond correctly and you get a new command. Respond wrong, and you lose one of your lives/chances.

These commands become increasingly complex over time, starting with “Left” or “Up”, gradually growing to “Not Down”, then “Not Not Up”, “Blue”, “not not green”, and so on.

With the speed of things constantly bearing down on you, and with the “follow the command prompt in time” gameplay, I was reminded a little of “Simon Says”, except the commands are limited in what you’re being told to do. It’s a simple game, and the challenge comes from processing what you’re being told to do in a short span of time.

With the timer constantly ticking down, it becomes a nerve-wracking experience, and you feel particularly dumb when you read a simple command like “not down” and you press down. The thing is, while I can enjoy a nerve-wracking experience, this wasn’t really a fun experience. I didn’t feel like I was playing anything, I was just following commands until I screwed up.

Graphically, the game doesn’t really do anything noteworthy either, featuring a simple cube and a simple humanoid figure, a few colored lights and that’s it. It works for the gameplay here, because you wouldn’t want something distracting while you’re trying to quickly follow one command after another, but neither does it leave any significant impression at all, or compel me to want to keep playing.

In the end, Not Not just wasn’t a fun experience for me, and it just made me nervous and frustrated. Maybe fans of mental exercises will find it worthwhile, but for most I’d argue to not not skip it.

tl;dr – Not Not is a Mental Exercise game where you’re following commands as a timer ticks down. It’s not really fun or especially noteworthy in any way.

Grade: C-

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