It’s officially my month anniversary as a California resident. Given all the applications I’ve filled out and exercise I’ve been doing, I decided I’d treat myself with a new game. It’s been pretty apparent that I’ve been obsessing over Mario Kart 7 for the past two weeks, but I started poking around on the Nintendo eShop. Pushmo was one of the featured games and I remembered hearing a lot of buzz about it on blogs and websites I frequent. After watching the trailer and realizing being unemployed means I can’t afford Battlefield 3, 6.99 didn’t seem like such a bad deal. So I took the plunge and this is how I feel.
Pushmo is a superbly original puzzle game developed by Intelligent Systems, released on December 8th to the Nintendo eShop. You play as Mallo, a chubby little dude-thing who is on a quest to save children that have been trapped inside Pushmos.
A Pushmo is a basically a stack of colorful blocks you push, pull, and climb so you can save a child who is trapped on top of the puzzle. Seems pretty simple right? So why haven’t I played anything like this before? Maybe I’m just out of the loop with puzzle games, I mean last one I was really crazy about was Puzzle League for GBA, or more recently Polarium on the DS…but neither compare to Pushmo.
The mixture of bright vibrant colors, cheerful music, and challenging puzzles make this game totally worth it for me. Not to mention how much replay value there is given you can build your own Pushmos and share them on the web by generating QR codes. People are posting their codes on a Pushmo sub-reddit as we speak and I suspect there will be an endless supply of puzzles popping up after the holiday season.
I also want to note how cool the shifting of blocks look in 3D…this is 3D done right.
I highly recommend this game to anyone and everyone, and believe you’re guaranteed to become addicted….like on an addictive scale of 1 to Alec Baldwin? I’d give this game an Alec Baldwin.
