Earlier this week I started playing Puzzlejuice, the game with the tagline, “A game that will punch your brain in the face.” I have to say: it’s true, and I’m fully addicted to it.
The premise is pretty simple at a glance. You use Tetris-like blocks to make lines, which turns the line into letters. Next, you spell words from the letters to get rid of them.
The kicker: while doing one thing, the other thing still needs your attention.
Pieces don’t stop falling, and those blocks aren’t going to go away unless you spell words out of them. What results is a frantic attempt at multitasking that starts off manageable, but quickly escalates into sheer madness.
Basic Gameplay: Fantastic
The game starts off slow, with a tutorial showing you how to play. To start, you can move, rotate, and drop the Tetrisy pieces around the screen. Your goal is to make lines. Like Tetris, you can see a couple shapes ahead.
Each shape is made up of colored blocks. If you can get three or more of the same color blocks next to one another and touch them, they will turn into letters. More on this in a second.
Each time you make a line with your blocks, each block in the line turns into a letter. From here, you can touch and drag across letters to spell words. When you spell a word, blocks will then be removed from the screen. (As you might imagine, touching colored-block chunks is helpful when you have a line of letters and no words, it quickly gives you more neighboring letters to work with).
Everything moves along simply, and you think, “this isn’t that hard.” You play a little bit longer and the game offers to up you into “EURO EXTREME MODE.”
Further Gameplay: Also Fantastic
As you’re playing, you can press pause to see a couple of objectives that you can shoot for (which are things like “spell a 5-letter word” and “make 10 lines”). Everything you do will get you points, and completing a series of objectives will get you new power-ups that let you do things like freeze the falling pieces or blow up chunks of placed blocks. The power-ups are extremely helpful, and can turn the tide between “lost cause” of a session to “back in it for more.”
As the game progresses, the pieces start dropping quicker. If you’ve been doing a good job, things are hard. However, most likely you have letters and holes in your blocks that won’t make lines. This makes things very hard.
The average game for me seems to last about 10-15 minutes. Starting off slow seems to get me every time — a “psh, I got this” — only to be struggling to find words with all the “Qu”s I’ve collected on my board.
Art, Style & Direction: The Difference Maker
This game would be great just as it were, but on top of all of this it looks beautiful, the controls work really well, and the humor is outstanding. Your best word after a game is referred to as your “Sweetest Word,” and the default name for entering into the high score list is “BROSEPH.” There is attention in almost every detail.
One thing that caught my attention is when you first start up the game (after the first time you go through the game). The screen is sort of “locked,” and to open the game you have to drop a piece down to make two lines, and then swipe across the letters to spell “PUZZLE” or “JUICE.” It’s almost all of the game mechanics right when you get there. A great feature.
Integration: Woot
The game hooks into GameCenter, and is a universal app. After playing both games, I’ve come to prefer it on the iPad. It’s easier for me to focus on everything as there is more in my peripheral vision.
The Cons: Very Few
While the game connects to GameCenter, there are (so far) no achievements. Not a deal breaker to me, but I’m accomplishing objectives in the game anyway, might as well track when I’ve done them.
Second, the game seems to crash more often than you’d want, and has already forced a full restart of my iPad once.
Finally (and this one is really just me): I find that it’s sometimes hard to draw the word I’m trying to draw on the iPhone. The letters are pretty small, and when you’re finger is touching them, they’re completely covered up. It’s hard to see which direction you need to move.
All-in-All: Buy It
It’s only $0.99 on the App Store, and is worth every penny. I assume that upcoming updates will stabilize the game a bit more, but things are working good enough as they stand now.
Puzzlejuice is a fantastic example of a great app: a simple idea executed impeccably well. Get downloading
