Safety
Editor's Review
Melon Sandbox is a small-scale free-form physics sandbox that can literally fit in the palm of your hand but feels like it's as big as a kid's imagination. Developed by indie studio Playducky and first launched in August 2021, the game started out life as the working title “Human Playground,” before evolving into the more tongue-in-cheek name “Melon Sandbox,” a nod to its fun, fruity-sounding characters and the way it treats destruction with a certain light-heartedness. It's a formula that began as a humble mobile experiment but has since bloomed into a cross-platform sensation, available in browsers, on Android, on iOS, and even inside fan-made PC wrappers, each of them united by the same simple proposition: plonk the player into an empty space, give them a toy box full of guns, gears, and grinning watermelons, and see what happens.
On the surface, the 2D, pixelated graphics feel as if they could have been lifted from an Atari game, but under that veneer lies a complex world of physics that allows for realistic weight, velocity and momentum of every nudge, spark and explosion. Objects shatter along plausible stress lines, ragdoll limbs flail with unnatural grace, flame advances from fuse to payload with mesmeric inevitability. Whether you are constructing a Rube-Goldberg siege tower, or are just curious what happens when a rocket-propelled chainsaw meets a crowd of unsuspecting melons, the game treats every collision as a micro scientific experiment, and a close observer is amply rewarded, whether through comedy or in the form of magnificent spectacle.
That toolbox is generous from the first moment you appear, as if magicked into the tiled, empty arena. Tabs line up along the left edge of the screen like drawers in the workbench of a mad scientist: melee weapons packed with knives, axes and lightsabers; ranged racks of pistols, plasma rifles and shoulder-mounted nukes; under “Contraptions”, wheels, thrusters, pistons and servos begging to be bolted into cars, catapults or tromping fortresses. Meanwhile, another “Liquids” category gushes acid, gasoline, healing serum and a mysterious, ethereal, glowing goo that mutates any poor sod who swills it down into an oversized brute. If that feels too limiting, holding any object down long opens a sub-menu where the mass, friction and buoyancy of the object can be tuned as sliders on a mixing board, as can their color.
The characters themselves, in all their variety (“melons” is the collective term, regardless of whether they look like apples, corncobs, or grinning pumpkins), act as soldiers, crash-test dummies, and punch lines all at once. You can costume them with tutus, knight helmets or hazmat suits, then you can dictate how they behave as an AI, a passive observer or a hostile shooter or a panicked civilian. Each melon is a full ragdoll simulation, so you feel the results as your own. See one stagger off a precipice brandishing a primed grenade or gasp as another is flung from a seesaw catapult into a spinning saw blade, the hat whirling after it like a tragic halo. There are no hit points, no scores, no win conditions: however it plays out is no more or less viable than any other, as long as it brings a smile to your face as wide and beery as can be.
In short, Melon Sandbox perseveres because it puts more faith in the player's curiosity than any scripted objective could. The game never questions why you're filling a swimming pool with gasoline or teaching a watermelon to drive a tank; it just gives you the match and steps back.
By Jerry | Copyright © JoyGamerss - All Rights Reserved
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