Once those blocks drop, you just can't stop...playing Crashmo.
‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ The ethos of sticking to a tried-and-tested formula has become more and more pervasive in today’s sequel-driven video games industry. To be fair, it’s a reliable approach to game design; Nintendo itself has built its legacy on the backbone of its stable base of franchises, forever updating the classic ideas that people still know and love. So it came as a huge surprise when, just one year after Intelligent Systems’ colourful puzzle platformer Pushmo (known as Pullblox in Europe) was released on the 3DS eShop to critical acclaim, a follow-up arrived in the form of Crashmo (known as Fallblox in Europe) – and it reinvented just about everything established by its predecessor.
To an avid fan of Pushmo, the differences might not be so obvious from glancing at these screenshots. At a macro level, the player still has to guide the bulbous sumo wrestler protagonist Mallo through hundreds of elaborate, abstract structures to reach the goal. But right from the first stage of Crashmo, it is readily apparent that the very fundamental nature of how the game works is completely different from the one that came before it.
In every puzzle, each individual block shape on the playing field can separate from the others, and if there is nothing underneath to support them, the blocks will fall. Whereas the structures were predefined in the previous game and it was simply up to the player to figure out a way to climb, these new rules in Crashmo, particularly the effect of gravity on the blocks, mean that it is now the player’s job to create their own structure that will enable them to reach the bird signifying the end of each stage.
It is initially a weird concept to wrap your head around, especially if you logged considerable time adapting a mind-set for Pushmo. Once you start to understand the intricacies of Crashmo, though, it feels almost impossible to go back. After the basic tutorials, the game wastes no time in getting to the challenging puzzles, introducing new mechanics like anti-gravity blocks and warp points at a good pace before mashing these ideas together just as you started to think you had mastered them individually. However, the difficulty never becomes overwhelming thanks to a wealth of helpful tools, including advanced camera controls, a time rewinding function and the ability to skip to the next stage at any moment.
The optional training levels, meanwhile, are useful for teaching the tricks of building a stairway out of seemingly nothing, allowing you to apply those tricks in more complicated scenarios in the main mode. It’s a game that requires astute spatial awareness and pattern recognition to conquer, but also allows players to adjust the difficulty curve and progress at a speed that suits them, with no penalty discouraging them from doing so.
Most importantly, Crashmo holds the qualities of the most successful brainteasers, in that it engenders feelings of both intelligence and stupidity, often simultaneously. Towards the end, Pushmo started to produce monolithic, twisted levels that, in practical terms, needed some degree of brute force to solve. This game, on the other hand, appears to be simpler at face value, with the puzzles frequently containing only a handful of components.
But that’s the deceptive genius of Crashmo; it is without a doubt more difficult than its forebear, and as a result, it’s all the more satisfying when you finally figure out that one area that had you scratching your head for hours. You will feel like an idiot for taking so long to put together what suddenly looks like such an easy solution, yet at the same time feel like the smartest person in the world for devising what is actually a measured solution to a carefully crafted puzzle.
Crashmo is the quintessential example of a Nintendo game. Underneath the infinitely accessible atmosphere of friendly characters, sugary-sweet visuals and cheerful music lies a game of great depth and finesse. For this reason, Crashmo is one of our top games of 2012.
