Mehmo

I love puzzle games. I swear, I do! But I just can't love Crashmo.

The first problem it presents is one of over-cautious handholding. This is especially perplexing for a handheld game, with limited battery life and attention span; Crashmo starts with unskippable cutscenes, and slow-scrolling dialog that explains obvious mechanics. When you push a block in a direction, the block moves in that direction. You don't say? Fascinating.

Fortunately, this problem mostly (though not completely!) dissipates after the introductory set of puzzles. But by then, the game's second problem has already set in:

With its fixation on a combination of special gravity, three-dimensional spatial reasoning, and platform jumping, even moderately-difficult puzzles get pretty damned complicated. (And that's well before extra mechanics like portal doors and movement buttons are introduced.) The result is that most puzzles are just too nuanced - for me, anyway - to visualize and pre-plan.

Consequently, puzzle-solving tends to devolve into a mess of trial-and-error, followed by rewind-or-reset. I've come away from most of them feeling like the solution was a particular "trick," one specific to its arrangement of blocks and their relative altitudes, and which is inapplicable to other puzzles. Figuring out one puzzle doesn't help me figure out the next -- in other words, I don't feel like playing more of the game made me any better at it.

Crashmo's puzzles aren't "bad," exactly, but the slipshod sense of learning and progression wasn't good enough to keep me interested.

Better than: Exit DS
Not as good as: Picross 3D
I still can't believe: That the game bothers trying to attach story and personality to its characters. Seriously, old man, I don't care about your lost birds!

Progress: Completed 68/100 puzzles