Crashmo

About a year ago I played through the 3DS Virtual Console game Pushmo; here's its sequel Crashmo. I knew going into this that the basic gist of the game was the same- block-sliding puzzles with cutesy characters and lots of pastels; but the game isn't quite a sequel to Pushmo because the style of puzzle is actually completely different and requires the player to learn a different set of physics rules. The original Pushmo puzzles basically featured a large flat wall covered with different colored squares, and your little character Mallo could pull the blocks out of the wall, giving them depth. He could then hop up onto the blocks to pull more flat squares out of the wall, and eventually he could climb these blocks to reach the goal at the top of the puzzle. Crashmo plays a bit differently. All of the blocks Mallo pushes and pulls actually exist with a set depth; there's no wall to pull objects out of. Now when Mallo pulls a block out from under another, the top block will "crash" downward until it rests on the ground or another block. In this way Crashmo felt a bit less imaginative; a few more twists were added to change up the gameplay, but I've seen puzzles like this before because it so much more closely follows real-world physics. Pushmo had a more solid gimmick in its wall of bricks and its best puzzles had elegant solutions, whereas the solutions to the more advanced puzzles in Crashmo often looked like a random pile of blocks. Still though if there's one thing Crashmo did better, it cut out the fat; there's a steady difficulty curve that avoids Pushmo's glut of easy levels to start or its unneccesary nostalgia-trip puzzles shaped like old 8-bit Nintendo characters throughout the game. A new game in the series was actually just released for the Wii U Virtual Console a few weeks ago- Pushmo World, and while I don't even have a Wii U yet, I'll probably end up playing that when I do, if only for completion's sake- these games are fun time wasters but nothing essential.