In Size Matters, the premise is that you are a scientist who has accidentally dumped shrinking formula on themselves in a lab accident. In practice, however, this is wholly irrelevant save for the “setting” of the areas.
The game is all about the mechanics. You start out large, but as the game goes on, you get progressively smaller and smaller. There are several pieces of lab equipment on benches around the lab, beakers of various chemicals, and notes – both written on the walls and on notepads – which contain instructions as to what chemicals you must combine, microwave, mix with water, or process through a machine that requires processing codes.
By the end of the level, you will have used every single chemical and formula in order to produce three chemical “keys”, which you load into one final device to make the cure and revert yourself to your original size.
If you take too long, you shrink to nothing and die.
Simple enough, right?
Yeah, actually, that’s about all there is to it.
The game is set in six 3D environments, most vaguely laboratory themed, though at least one level diverges from that somewhat. The game basically consists of two phases – you will want to start searching the lab immediately to find all the chemicals and the chemical formulas, and then you’ll want to start processing them through the lab equipment to create the keys.
All of the labs have numerous drawers, shelves, and various other places that can contain the various chemicals or lab notes. The chemicals mostly aren’t too difficult to find, but the lab notes that tell you what to do can not only be in drawers, but on top of high places, and can be easy to overlook.
This is a game with a time limit, and each round it varies somewhat. But the really tricky part – at least in theory – is that the longer a round goes on, the smaller you get. Initially, it’s pretty easy to access all of the lab equipment and chemicals and explore the lab, but as you get smaller and smaller, you not only slow down, but it becomes increasingly difficult to get up to the lab benches. If you get too small, you need to have stuff lying around on the floor to climb up on – and preferably, you set that up beforehand, when you were large, so it wouldn’t be too onerous to do, as you also get weaker and have more trouble moving things around as you get smaller.
The main problem is that, for all this, if you figure out how the game works, it honestly becomes a bit rote. You set up for yourself as you’re searching, and it never really involves piling up more than a couple things at most, and often just one; on some of the easier levels, you don’t even need to bother, as you can solve them fast enough to not need to worry too much about shrinking.
There are six preset levels, with various starting heights, rate of shrinkage, gravity, and the number of things you have to solve, which take place in five different environments. Strangely, there is a sixth environment which is used in absolutely none of the preset game setups for no apparent reason.
The game also allows you to completely customize your rate of shrink, your speed, gravity, the processing speed of various devices, and pretty much everything else relevant to the game physics.
In addition to the six preset levels, there’s a bunch of random achievements for doing various random things in the game – some of these you’ll acquire naturally, some you need to work at, some you need to search for. Amusingly, one of them is for failing a mission and dying – and it was the very last achievement I got, because this is not a particularly difficult game (though I did get down to the last 10 seconds on a 25 minute mission once).
All in all, this is an extremely simplistic game. It took me under two hours to beat all the presets, and about four to get all the achievements and 100% the game. It doesn’t really have a ton of gameplay variety on offer, and while having six different environments is nice, they aren’t really all that distinctive in terms of gameplay – in the end, you are doing the same things, just with a different room setup.
There’s not a whole lot to this game.
I got it as part of a Humble Bundle, and there, it wasn’t really “unreasonable” as a throwaway game – something that seems kind of neat, that you tinker with briefly and then never play again.
But as a stand-alone title, it is kind of hard for me to recommend it. It just feels so ephemeral; there’s really just not a whole lot to it, and it doesn’t really do anything particularly clever with the shrinking.
They had an idea, they built a simple game around it… and while it is okay, it is just nothing really to write home about. I can’t really recommend it to anyone, even though it isn’t really bad, because it isn’t really all that good, either. It simply is.
1.5