The Crossing, the latest game on Orisinal is kind of lame. I stopped playing when I still had three extra deers, because I had lost interest.
Now, I’m not saying this just to complain that the free game that a complete stranger made for me is not good enough. I will use this to illustrate a factor in making a game fun.
Consider Chicken Wings Are Not For Flying in comparison. That’s the game that first got me into Orisinal, but the premise is very similar to The Crossing: save cute animals from plummeting. So why do I love one but not the other?
I think it is a matter of flexibility that offers choices to the player. In CWANFF, you can save a chick near the top of the screen by throwing the umbrella higher, or you can wait and then throw the umbrella lower. So you are constantly making the decision of which of two or three on-screen chicks to save first that will leave you time to save the others.
The deer game, on the other hand, does not allow this degree of flexibility. There is a very small window in which to save a deer, and if you save the deer near the start or end of that window, the method and the result is the same.
The first time I encountered the “bounce things across a chasm” gameplay was in Earthworm Jim 2. But there, you could hit the jump button to dive for a puppy, which could be used as a last-ditch save. You can count that as something that made the controls two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional.
Also, consider the paddle games like Breakout and Arkanoid. In those, you only moved along one dimension, but the position at which you hit the ball would alter its path. As far as I can tell, the deer in The Crossing react the same whether you catch them on the left or the right, and no matter what direction your paddle is moving.
By not having any interaction with the deer beyond a binary saved/not-saved, there isn’t a lot to engage the player’s interest.