Jackie💿

going to start saying this instead of videogames. goice, goicelikes.

I spent much of my day exhausting myself hacking Kirby's Dream Land 2, so tonight I decided to blow off some steam by doing something a little different--going to modarchive.org and using the "Random Pick!" option to hear some new tracker module music. I kept track of which mods I landed on and wrote down my thoughts on them, with a scale of Bad, Poor, Okay, Good, and Great.

Mushi no Idokoro is a game that looks nice, simple and cute on the surface. The intro cutscene shows you a world of weird but cute looking "bugs" (one of them is just a pile of poop!) that travel around and get caught up in bizarre, difficult to describe mischief. If you dig the early 3D aesthetics of the PS1 or even 90s PC stuff, you're probably gonna love said intro. Once you get into the game proper, though, the facade lifts - this is a puzzle game, and it's a puzzle game that's gonna crush you in no time flat!

You're presented with a cube that has somewhere between 80-90 bugs on it and your job is to manipulate the cube to eliminate the bugs in pairs of 2 or more before time runs out. Sounds conceptually simple, but the controls, various mechanics, and visual overload ensure that it's way, way harder than it sounds. You don't just use a single button or the d-pad/analog stick here, oh no, this game has some fascinatingly bizarre controls for you to work with. The stick is used to rotate the cube, zooming in and out is done with L1/L2, selecting a row/column of bugs to manipulate is done with R1/R2, and you use the face buttons to move the bugs like a conveyor belt in the direction that corresponds to the placement of the face button. Not only do you have to watch said conveyor belt move fairly slowly, you need to make sure to stop it at the correct time to make a match since the game won't stop it for you. If you over/undershoot, you won't get the match and you'll have to waste time watching them slowly revert to their original position! The time limit isn't usually going to be your downfall once you get the hang of the controls, but any mistake like this is still going to sting.

At first, making matches is simple since there are so many bugs and the game uses a very smart visual cue to indicate potential matches (if the bugs are dancing, they're eligible for a match), but once things dry up, that's when the game just gets plain mean. Depending on the previous matches you made and where you placed each bug, there's a very good chance you'll end up in a situation where you can't make any more moves. The game accounts for this, though, and offers you three chances to move any row or column without making a match. Three chances is nice, but with the time ticking down and the game's difficult to maneuver camera making it tricky to plan out moves, these chances often aren't enough. Just try getting 20 bugs to match in three moves, it's a dang hard thing to do! If you lose, you'll have to start the whole stage over again with a newly randomized arrangement of bugs. And if you do manage to win? You're gonna have to keep doing it! That's right, winning once isn't enough; the way level progression works is that you need to clear a given level multiple times to fill up a progression bar before you can move on. The bugs change on each attempt, but the theme, music, and number of non-matching moves only change between levels. Get past the first level and they'll start taking away your chances to fix a useless bug arrangement, making things even harder!

At its core, it's a fun game to play once you get the hang of it, but the fact that the entire round essentially rests on the last few moves creates something of a nightmare scenario where it feels like you're stuck in a time loop repeating the same thing over and over again until you eventually get a different result. Planning for the future is normal in puzzle games, but this game asks you to do it so far in advance and seemingly without the proper guidance in place to facilitate said planning that I don't think my brain can handle it. At first, I thought this was just because I started playing it after coming home from a night of drinking, but I tried it again the following day and still got my butt whooped consistently. I did manage to make it to level 4, but at that point, they only give you 1 chance to fix the board in the event of zero matches and that's just plain ridiculous!

If anyone has played this and gotten further than me, I'd love to hear your secrets because I really do want to see the rest of the cutscenes. This game's so obscure and hard that I couldn't find a single full playthrough on Youtube...