Arachnophilia

Review by Lauren Burger

Arachnophilia is a line-drawing flash game best played with a tablet pen or similar device by DigYourOwnGrave games. It can also be played with a mouse if needed.

The way arachnophilia works is you are given a set area in which you can build your web. You build your web by drawing lines from point to point, whether it be from one piece of web to another, or one branch to another. You can have a lot of fun making cool web designs, but the urge to make fun designs is dropped almost instantly when the game's sharp difficulty curve takes over and forces you to build for strategy rather than design.

My only real complaint about this game is how horrifically hard it is to play with a touchpad. This game is definitely more suited for playing with a stylus of some sort.

I really like the design of this game. It's simple, but the music is really gentle, with crickets on top, so it gives a nice nighttime feel. I also really like how eating different bugs does different things as the game progresses.

As a spider, your goal is simply to build a web, eat bugs, and stay alive. You need to build the web to catch bugs, and you need to eat bugs to keep your health from depleting. Every second you spend in the game without eating results in you losing health. When your health reaches zero, the game is over.

As you go alone, you're forced to strategize as to what bugs you will eat when, what ones you need to eat as soon as they get caught in the web, and so on and so forth. I have a habit of saving ladybugs, because they heal a significant amount of your health, and eating fireflies as soon as they appear, because moths flock to them, and too many bugs in your web at once can force your web to collapse. Not only that, but when certain parts of your web get too old, they'll collapse on their own.

One thing that bothered me, however, aside from the controls, (which drove me up the wall whenever I tried to play without my pen) was the speed of the game. Look down for one second, and half your web might be destroyed by a beetle, because if a bug is too big or too dangerous for your web, it'll fly right through it, and destroy whatever parts it comes in contact with. The same goes for bats, who are nearly impossible to trap.

Luckily, if you eat a dragonfly, it'll give your spider a little speed boost, but sometimes your web can just be overwhelmed, and you'll be stuck in a corner with depleting life and no means of catching more bugs, because they've all released themselves from your web.