After Kumoon last week I was after another puzzle experience and at some stage I got my hands on MouseCraft by Crunching Koalas, a studio which despite the name, is based in Poland. MouseCraft sees you controlling a some kind of bizarre scientist cat who is running experiments involving Mice, Cheese and Tetronimos. There is a story that vague justifies why our science-cat wants to get these mice safely to the cheese but I have to admit I haven’t paid that much attention to it, there is some kind of a mysterious sponsor and crystals but really these crystals just serve as bonus objectives for any given level.
When I grabbed MouseCraft I was hoping for was a well paced puzzle game, a game which delivers puzzles of slowly increasing complexity; both in the amount of steps and attempts needed to solve a puzzle and the tools available to solve it. I wanted the later puzzles to be clearly related to the early puzzles but contain a new mechanics and tools and take much more time and mental effort to resolve. This was something Kumoon really lacked, the early puzzles and the later puzzles were basically the same, there weren’t new block types or shot types, they just took longer. MouseCraft on the other hand has already introduce block bombs, mecha-rats, crystals and jelly blocks in the first set of levels and the difficulty has progressed from puzzles that could be by just leaping in to puzzles that take a little thought and often a few attempts to iron out the complications. I am pretty pleased with it so far and you can expect to see more MouseCraft next week.