”Gumboy” is heralded as someone who “…will become a member of your family, your very close friend.” Whether or not you want a spherical, rubbery piece of gum that transforms into other shapes and has a permanent, somewhat creepy smile affixed to its face being present at the dinner table each evening—that’s your call. Weird analogies aside, Gumboy: Crazy Adventures is a novel puzzle game and one of the better offerings from publisher Meridian4.
The game is split up over five sets of levels (six, counting the tutorials), each with a different theme and objective. The starting levels take place in a lush forest environment, and then move on to open fields, then to a set of caves, and so on. There are about 40 levels in total, plus eleven introductory training levels to help new players become accustomed to the game which makes for quite a bit of content. Scattered throughout these levels are also an assortment of power-ups and bonus items (such as a “Water Cube” for moving through the water more efficiently) which Gumboy must collect in order to help him on his way.
Gumboy: Crazy Adventures provides an experience that is both challenging and addictive. Each level in the game has a general objective in mind, which usually entails trying to obtain an object and guiding it back to a given entity. This requires first finding the entity (for example, a sentient tree aptly named “Mr. Bean” found in the second set of levels) so he or she can give you a Magnetizer power-up, which then gives Gumboy the ability to push around any loose objects he encounters. Then Gumboy has to go out, find enough of the objects (like a bean, or a magic bubble) and find some way to guide it back intact.
What makes this challenging is the game’s gimmick; significant effort has been put forth into implementing the integrated physics system, which you must interact with constantly in order to accomplish your objective and move on to the next level. Gumboy, being the round, bouncy, happy go-lucky piece of…… gum that he is, rolls around and behaves just like you expect.
Part of the challenge actually constitutes trying to find a way to navigate the rounded ramps and ledges that make up the environment, and the other part is using the magnetizer to guide the objective back – often while also trying to avoid destroying it. This leads to a bit of a problem; eventually some of the later challenges become a shade tedious. One of the final levels for example requires you to first transform Gumboy into “Air Cube” form, and then float around trying to pick up a certain quantity of items. The problem is that most of the items are craftily positioned under archways or just above an awkwardly-placed ramp, and trying to get Gumboy to float in just the right direction is an almost-maddening experience.
Gumboy’s main focus is challenging the player through physics-based puzzles. Not only do you need to find different ways of getting into different areas of a level thanks to the sloped and highly varied terrain styles, but once you find a given objective, the next challenge is trying to find a way to guide it back through proper bumps and nudges. In some of the later levels, going too fast (or in the wrong direction) often destroys the object you are trying to bring back, forcing you to retreat to where you had originally found it and try again (items respawn, thankfully) – this isn’t terribly annoying at first, but eventually it becomes more than a little tedious in some of the end levels.
Fortunately, the tedium is reduced somewhat by the fact that the game is just flat fun to play. The music is calming and fits the wilderness theme perfectly, the sound effects blend into the game exactly how you expect, and the game consistently surprises you with a smorgasbord of fancy graphical and lighting effects, particle displacement – it even scales up to higher resolutions (like 1680x1050) with no problems at all.
