Pastel Muses (Saturn)

There's a lot of iteration in the world of puzzle games: one game gets popular, and other developers try to replicate this success by taking the core mechanic of that game, and adding to it, or changing it in some way. Sometimes it might be the same developer, like how Taito tried to repeat the success of their Puzzle Bobble games by taking those games' ruleset and applying it to an Arkanoid-alike when they made Puchi Charat. Softoffice, developers of Pastel Muses and no other games before or since, took the "shooting coloured bubbles at each other" concept from Puzzle Bobble, and moved the target bubbles from the top of a well to the bottom of a small valley.

To clarify, like Puzzle Bobble, Pastel Muses has you control a cute character firing coloured bubbles from a device, with the aim of matching sets of three or more to make them disappear. The difference is that while PB has you at the bottom of the screen shooting bubbles upwards, PM has you on the left of the screen, shooting them to the right. That is a little unfair of a description, though, as there's a big difference in how the two games control, too. In Puzzle Bobble, the test of your skill in in precision aiming, like a sniper: your job is to point your gun in the exact right direction to make the bubble go where you want it to, and the bubble will travel in a straight line in whatever direction you shoot it. In Pastel Muses, however, the direction in which your gun is pointing is pretty much irrelevant, and instead, your task is to determine the power with which your bubbles are fired, determined by how long you hold down the fire button. Furthermore, Pastel Muses' bubbles don't travel in straight lines, but arcs, reliant on how much power you use to shoot them.

Another twist is that the playing field is on a hill, with the player at the top and the game ending when a bubble reaches them. So, if you pop bubbles near the bottom of the hill, those above will roll down to take their place, causing traditional puzzle game chain reactions. It all takes a bit of getting used to, but after a few plays, you'll pick up the knack of instinctively knowing just how long to hold the fire button down to get the bubbles to go where you want.

There's a few different modes of play based around the game's basic idea. There's a mode directly lifted from the Puzzle Bobble games where you play various sets of preset puzzle stages laid out in a branching alphabetical path, there's a kind of survival/time attack hybrid mode where you clear stages as fast as you can against the time limit, with a small amount of extra time being added after each stage, and there's a more traditional survival mode where the bubbles keep gradually advancing until you can't keep them back any more. The time attack is probably the best of the three, feeling more urgent and more arcadey, it's a shame there aren't more puzzle games with a similar mode.

Pastel Muses is an okay game. If you really like puzzle games and the satisfying feeling of slowly mastering a slightly unintuitive control method, then it's worth a shot. Bear in mind, though, how much I mentioned Puzzle Bobble in this review, since it's so incredibly derivative of it that it'd be a lot more difficult to describe without mentioning its inspiration. So if you're a stickler for originality, it might not be for you.