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YMMV / Logical Journey of the Zoombinis

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  • Awesome Music: The Bubblewonder Abyss theme, very chilling and fitting for a final stage. It's one of the reasons why the level's listed under Nightmare Fuel, after all.
  • Breather Level: Who's Bayou's puzzles are much more relaxed than the rest of the game.
    • Captain Cajun's Ferryboat can technically be unwinnable if you have a wrong combination of features in your troop, but you have unlimited tries.
    • Titanic Tattooed Toads actually gets easier on Oh, So Hard difficulty with the swapping stick letting you essentially build your own path. The two higher difficulties introduce crabs that may impede your path, but at worst they'll simply make the puzzle take longer to complete.
    • Stone Rise on high difficulties may require a lot of trial and error, but the player once again has unlimited tries.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Arno, probably due to him being a Large Ham, which probably what led him to returning in Island Odyssey. Lampshaded in the Kickstarter trailer, with all of the new features of the game being labeled as "More [whatever]", ending with "MORE ARNO!!"
    • The Fleens for being sinister counterparts to the Zoombinis and being the center of one of the better puzzles of the game.
  • First Installment Wins: Logical Journey is much more famous and well reviewed than its sequels. Mountain Rescue is still considered good in its own right, but not many enjoy Island Odyssey.
  • Fountain of Memes: Arno is the fountain, and pretty much everything he says is memetic.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Designing the Zoombinis in your groups to be as similar as possible will make puzzles based on their features significantly simpler. In some cases (particularly with Captain Cajun's Ferryboat), it can become literally impossible to mess up.
    • In the original version of Logical Journey, you can have groups where every Zoombini had a twin, halving the difficulty of nearly all feature-based puzzles. The Fleens do become harder to deal with since you may have to guess the right one twice, but you can avoid them by taking the northern route. Not possible in the remake, since you can't have twins in the same group any more.
    • In the remake, you can close the game in the middle of a puzzle, which will reset when you open the game the next time, eliminating the need to start the whole leg of the journey over if you screw up.
  • Genius Bonus: For a children's game, it teaches surprisingly deep lessons on logic, set theory, and linear algebra. (If you aren't guessing randomly, that is.)
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Thanks to its Superlative Dubbing, this game is part of every South Korean's childhood and one of the best-selling PC games in the country.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Arno and his pizza machine are this with Let's Pizza.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: A complaint some people have about the remake is that saving only 400 Zoombinis is required for the game to consider it 100% Completion rather than one for every possible feature combination, equalling 625note  like the original. Other fans don’t mind this finding it to be a much more reasonable number, finding the original amount excessive. Others have argued this actually balances the difficulty by making it harder for completionists, as now you have much less margin for error in the middle levels: if you want to get every building in Zoombiniville, you need to get three full groups of sixteen Zoombinis through both Who's Bayou and Deep Dark Forest at the first three difficulties, plus once more on the hardest difficulty: a total of 320. On top of that, getting the last achievement in both these paths brings the total to 384. This will likely result in a lot of Save Scumming and may make up for the length issue for those worried about it.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "FLEENS? You're not Fleens! Whatever you are... MAKE ME A PIZZA!"
      • "MORE TOPPINGS!"
    • The narrator's hammy line "Hip hip, ZOOMBIIIIIINIIIIIII! Hip hip, ZOOMBIIIIIINIIIIIII!"
  • Narm Charm: The narrator's hilarious over-acting.
    Narrator: The darkest, most dangerous part of the journey is YET TO COME! MUAHAHAHA!!
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • Much of the game, due to the eerie music and often surreal visuals, but especially the final leg through the mountain caves.
    • The Lion's Lair lets you throw Zoombinis into the abyss. Sure, they get chucked back, but still...
    • Bubblewonder Abyss is especially worst. It has a dark atmosphere, creepy sound effects in the background, and the ability to vaporize any Zoombinis who take the wrong path through the maze (like the Lion's Lair, you get them back, but that didn't make it any less scary!).
  • Periphery Demographic: A significant portion of the fanbase are adults; partially due to being young during the initial release, and partially because it still poses a challenge even to older audiences.
  • Surprise Difficulty: The game's design appeals to kids, but the Very, Very Hard difficulty is notorious for being a true challenge even for adults; Hotel Dimensia and Lion's Lair have made people tear their hair out.
  • That One Achievement: In the remake, earning both "Tree Hugger" and "Swamp Thing" at the highest difficulty requires getting three full groups of sixteen Zoombinis through both Who's Bayou and Deep Dark Forest at all four difficulties. That's 384 Zoombinis out of the available 400 that have to be escorted through this part of the game without breaking up a party. Of the two, "Swamp Thing" is significantly easier because two of the puzzles in Who's Bayou can be cheesed if you bring the right party along, while the puzzles in Deep Dark Forest are much easier to mess up.
  • That One Level: Pretty much everything on Very, Very Hard. Hotel Dimensia and The Lion's Lair deserve special mention. The hotel has literally 125 rooms, meaning it's Trial-and-Error Gameplay here more than ever. And there's no clock to gauge how many chances you have left. If you can't figure out where each one goes in the time allotted, then too bad. As for The Lion's Lair... in this level, you'd get some sort of hint as to how to properly order the Zoombinis. Your hint here? You don't get one. This basically makes it like Hotel Dimensia with less chances to screw up; after your sixth wrong placement, the gate slams down and you can't take anybody else through.
    • Hotel Dimensia on Very Hard is actually worse than its harder difficulty. A number of the 25 rooms are boarded upnote , meaning that if you place the first Zoombini in the wrong room, you've just irreversably screwed any chance you had of continuing with a full team without knowing it. At least on Very, Very Hard you can place a Zoombini in the right room without it being boarded up, even if there are 125 different rooms.
    • The Mirror Machine is maligned on all its difficulties not for being hard, but for being very time consuming.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While the remake has been well-received in general, and the dev team has done their absolute best to avert this to the point of even keeping the original sound files, there have been some complaints. One thing people bring up is the Zoombinis' rounder redesign; this was actually a return to their original concept. The "eggplant" shape used in 1996 was a result of Executive Meddling by Brøderbund.

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