Be ready to be jumpy and going aaw at the same time. The Adventures of Shuggy is full of ghosts, spiders, goblins and other supposing-to-be-scary stuff. This game is too cute to be scary.
Shuggy inherits a castle, but he quickly discovers something is wrong – it’s haunted! By spiders on cardboards, goblin ghosts, zombies and much more. The game is simple; you have to collect all the glowing gems from the different rooms to get rid of all the baddies that keeps Shuggy from enjoying his new home.
Challenge...ful?
There’s a great amount of different rooms to enjoy, which gives the player plenty of playtime. Each room has different challenges, and each room has a way of solving it – with a good learning curve, you’ll get through the game via the oldie but goodie: Trial and error. Jump and spin the room then hitting the spikes you didn’t encountered for? No lives, no continues, just a restart of the room, and you’ve learned that this is not how to do the room.
Different rooms have different conditions and circumstances – on top of that Shuggy changes features and powers accordingly. There’s gravity to utilise, doublejump, superjump, magic rope, gravity can be on the side, spinning parts of or the entire room to be able to get all the gems. Most rooms are straightforward and pretty easy to collect, there’s a few challenging ones that really depends on the skills of the hands holding the controller – and this is where my patience and skills is robust. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. 3 on my NES, and I love platformers – the puzzle element in Shuggy makes me stop and think on how to time my movements correct so that I can get through the room, but this happened after couple of deaths – I tend to just go for it.
It does differ from “just a platformer” to a puzzler by the elements in the rooms – ropes, physics and teleporters all are a huge part of solving a level. You have to make use of these to reach all the gems.
Have a friend tag along
Co-op is pretty fun to play with a friend at your side. Here you have both to be survivors, because if one of you die, you’ll fail the challenge and have to restart the room, so it’s all about timing here as well – and cooperation. I particularly remember one level where I was at normal gravity, but my partner had a gravity in another direction. None of us could reach the last gem, but if he carried the little block, and I was standing on it, he jumps with me over the edge, and I jump the last part to reach the gem, we could reach it. There’s not as much co-op levels as there is singleplayer levels, and this has it’s good and bad sides – there’s not much playtime with friends, but it’s beatable and you still feel you’ve accomplished something. You’ll get to choose from five different cute characters when playing with a friend.
Shuggy is well animated with some great puzzles, and colorful worlds. Bossfights is fun, and a few rooms can get really challenging – you don’t even have to get all the rooms to get through the game. I had so much fun dodging mines, spiders and spikes that the hours of playtime just past by the speed of light. Yet, the story and gameplay is too simple that I can give the game top score – and small annoying things such as zombie mode also counts in.
