Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS (DS)

Like Binary Land, I also received a physical copy of this game as a kind gift from a patreon subcriber, this time Justin, of the excellent (though sadly seldom updated) site, Tinpot Gamer! This time, it's a cute puzzle-platformer that was ported to DS from the Playstation. Unfortunately, I haven't played the Playstation version, so I can't tell you how they compare. I can only tell you about this version on its own terms.

Anyway, the biggest thing that will hit you about this game is the presentation: there's lots of art in the cutscenes and on the title screen and in the backgrounds of the stages by prolific artist Izumi Takemoto (who has appeared on this blog before, back when I reviewed the Saturn adventure game Dinosaur Island). I don't think any of his work in any field has ever been released in English, though if I'm wrong, please tell me. As well as that, each set of stages has a theme, like cake, medicine, sleeping, and so on, and the player character has a different sprite for each theme! And that's not all, either: each set of stages has its own background music, with not only vocals, but also karaoke lyrics on the bottom screen!

It's already the third paragraph, and I haven't even mentioned how the game plays yet! Each stage has various differently coloured cubes that you can push around. They disappear when three or more are touching, and the aim of each stage is to get rid of them all. Like you'd expect from a game like this (that doesn't hide it like certain other games that have recently been on this blog, rassum frassum), your movement and jumping is all very precise: jumps always reach the same height and cover the same distance, and you always move one block's width at a time.

The problem with a lot of these games is that they're either so easy as to be a boring timewaster, or so hard that I get a few stages in and give up. Loopop Cube is a rare case that falls somewhere in the middle! I've gotten slightly stuck a few times, but I've managed to get over thirty stages in so far (out of 120) without totally giving up yet, so that's pretty great.

In summary, Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS is a very cute, well presented game, that's also alright to play. Obviously, it doesn't have the kind of superfast action I usually crave, but as the ancient philosophers said: a man cannot live on bullet patterns alone.