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The Adventures of Shuggy review

Two of my favourite game genres are platformers and puzzlers, and we here at allaboutgames.co.uk certainly love it when the two get together. Dig a little into our archives and you're sure to find some of the higher scoring games are platformers from the outstanding Portal 2, to the adventurous Outland, and the atmospheric Limbo. So I was delighted a few weeks ago when I got the chance to pick up The Adventures of Shuggy and put it through it paces.

The Adventures of Shuggy, quite simply, is a very cute puzzle platformer. You take on the role of Shuggy who has managed to inherit a mansion. Unfortunately, when he gets there, he discovers that it's a bit of a mess and, to makes matters worse, all manner of creatures have made themselves at home. It's therefore down to Shuggy to fix this place up. This basic premise forms the core narrative of the game and is delightfully presented in animated short comics which pop up to tell the story at key moments. Once you've been introduced to this world, you're dropped into the hub, a mini-level in its own right. A series of doors are scattered throughout which grant you access to the game's puzzles. Only a limited amount are available to you from the start, with more doors opening as you complete puzzles. There are usually a fair selection available to you to choose from at any given moment so if you happen to be stuck on one, another is available to try. Not that you need that, because as we discovered, puzzles can typically be completed in your first attempt. That's not to say these puzzles are easy; many require a lot of forethought and planning to come up with just the right sequence that you need, but typically you can solve it yourself in your first play through and it feels very rewarding when you do so.

In the puzzles themselves the end goal for each level is to grab all the gems that have been scattered around. Smudged Cat Games have jammed-packed a large amount of puzzle mechanics into this game, and there are a good amount of puzzles dedicated to each one. The first and most basic type allows you to rotate the entire level, shifting gravity 90 degrees to the left or right, helping you reach those hard-to-get gems. Shifting the world in the correct direction becomes incredibly important as rotating the wrong way could see you falling into a nasty trap, such as a block of spikes or a wandering enemy. Trickier gameplay types are introduced as the game progresses; my particular favourite being the rewind time mode, where the level - excluding yourself - gets reset every 30 seconds. Your past actions are then played out in front of you, but be careful not to touch your past self otherwise the level will restart. This is an ingenious puzzle mode and can lead to some genuinely tricky levels with you leaping and hiding from yourself and holding down switches for your future self to walk through. Altogether there are over 100 puzzles set across five different worlds and they impressively scale in complexity as you work your way through the game. The world-end bosses are particularly enjoyable as you get to use the mechanics of that particular world to defeat them. For example, one boss requires you to press several of the switches simultaneously, which is where the time resetting mechanic comes in.

When I first discovered that a multiplayer function had been included my mind immediately went to coop puzzles, but to my surprise, The Adventures of Shuggy had included an almost deathmatch-style mode. Played over Xbox Live, this mode sets you against a single online opponent in a platforming arena with the task of grabbing the most gems. These gems are scattered across the level and reappear at set intervals. Ability drops occur at random throughout the few minutes the match lasts for, and these give you the advantage over your opponent. Unfortunately this all feels incredibly tacked on, and isn't really that much fun. Luckily though, hidden away on the local multiplayer, Smudged Cat Games has packed in a great co-op mode too, albeit played on the same screen. This mode is as fun as the single player mode and even has its own set of unique levels from each of the five worlds. These levels involve both of your characters at the same time and require you to work together to press switches in the correct order and generally help each other out. Whilst there are no new co-op abilities, the existing puzzle mechanics become all the more challenging when another player is added to the equation.

The Adventures of Shuggy is a great looking Xbox Live Arcade game, with a large amount of variety in its puzzles and its fair share of brain-stumping moments. With the exception of a few drops in framerate when you pick up the jewels and an unimpressive online multiplayer mode, the execution is flawless. This is a superb game and would fit neatly into any puzzle enthusiast's home.

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