Tiny Review: Pushmo

Pushmo (or if you’re going by its more appropriate European title, Pullblox) is a fantastic and addictive puzzler, one of the best I’ve played in a long time, that’s available on 3DS’s eShop right now for $7 — much more expensive than the prices people have grown used to for little games like this on the App Store or other similar services, but this is a Nintendo-quality production.

Four things that are fab:

1. It’s such a simple/easy concept! The idea is you’re pushing and pulling block shapes, trying to climb your way up to the top of the stage to reach a cute little baby thing. But as you progress, new mechanics like manhole warps and ladders are introduced, adding more complexity to the levels just when you think you’ve mastered the game’s block logic.
2. Sprite stages. Because of the pixelart-esque look of the blocks, many of the levels are designed to look like different characters or sprites (similar to Picross). The one that looks like Saturn was pretty neat! It also leads us to the next point…
3. Sharing levels. As with FreakyForms, there’s a lot of people creating user-generated stages and posting them online. With the built-in editor, you can make your own sprite levels, save a screenshot, and share them as a QR code — like the super awesome Tiny Cartridge one above made by Pukka.
4. The mischievous brat who comes in and messes up the tutorial stages. His pose after hitting the level’s reset button is like the troll face times a million. You can see what I mean in the video below.

Three things that are butt:

1. Too many tutorial levels. Before you get to the meat of the game, you have to ride through too many simple stages revisiting the same ideas.
2. The uninspiring scenes in between every group of 18 stages. Instead of something fun or charming to look forward to after completing so many levels, all you get is a a shot of the babies you rescued.
3. There really needs to be an easier way to share QR codes than pulling out the SD card and transferring the image to your computer, or opening up Gmail in the browser to email the screenshot to yourself.

Score:

• eShop’s Pictobits/Boxlife, the creative, original puzzler validating Nintendo’s download platform  

Bonus:

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[Game Center CX QR code via Capndrake]

tags / pushmo / reviews / intelligent systems / gaming / eshop / nintendo 3ds / 3ds