Origamo is a nice alternative for matching puzzle games created by Destiny Software Productions in 1994. While the premise is very basic, the game itself is quite addictive. You have to take pieces from a conveyor belt, and use them to fill a shape. You have several kinds of pieces, all based on triangles, thus you can find plane triangles, squares, paralellograms, and squares with a triangle attached.
You can rotate the pieces with your right button (yes, the game is mouse oriented) and place them with the left button. The pieces you don't use remain in the belt, and if you stack too many of them, you lose the stage. As you complete certain portions of the shape, the remaining pieces are cleared, giving you a break. You also have a drop zone where you can dispose of a useless piece, but it will be back soon, so you can use this to rearrange the pieces you have left, so they occupy less space. Again, you can use the drop zone to keep a valuable piece you don't want to disappear when you're about to complete a subsection of the shape.
The stages are combined into levels. You always start at the "Happy Buda" level, where you have 3 basic shapes to fill. You can always tell how hard a level is going to be by looking at the bonus it gives. Normally, the harder levels require many triangles (hard to get) and are quite quick, making you lose frequently. If you forfeit a level before you lose, you don't lose any points, but if you stack too many unused pieces, you lose the stage and the bonus points are deducted from your current score.
Usually, you only have to complete one stage per level in order to advance, but certain levels require special conditions, such as having completed a full previous level.
The map disposition is quite a maze, you have lots of stages, and several difficulty levels. This game is a good catch for puzzle lovers, as well a nice variation of the tetris style games.
Written by:
~niklas
