While completing a bunch of steam badges, I was able to pick up some 90% off coupons. Goo Cubelets was one I grabbed for 20 US cents. A colourful block puzzle game for cheap? Well, there are reasons for this.

I really could of done without playing this one. While it has a couple of nice concepts, there are several issues that left me feeling annoyed.

In this game, you control a small green cube and have to push red and blue cubes onto marked spaces on the map. While it sounds like a basic block pushing sokoban puzzler, it does try out a few different things.

I only made it 3/5 the way through the game before write up time, and by then I had had enough. From what I can tell it later introduces a third movable block (violet) and is leading up to one large and final puzzle.

Blocks don't move when you stand next to them and push. Instead you have to start from two spaces away and move in the direction you want the red/blue block to move. When the green block lands in a square, it jiggles and will push movable blocks in the direction you are moving when it lands next to them. This will only affect blocks the direction you moved, and not to the left and right of your position.

This caught me out at first and I thought the game was buggy, but it is how the puzzles are designed. You have to plan out the moves around the play field space in advance and be sure you are not going to trap one to an unmovable space because you don't have the running distance.

Pushing a block this way into a free space adjacent another block will move that third block, provided it has space. You can't push two touching blocks this way, but the colours in this example don't matter.

Eventually you start to control multiple green blocks at once, puzzles are either designed with holding spaces to do one half at a time, or expect you to solve both at once. There are some legitimately interesting puzzles with this that were fun to solve.

Further along there are neutral blocks you can push, and height is introduced. Though the mechanics of this rely on you holding down the keys and skipping over small jumps. This risks you overshooting the space and hitting R to restart.

So why did I not like it?

1) Floaty controls in a game where precision is really required. While the puzzles can be nice, the controls make them frustrating to play.

2) The timer for each level starts before the level has fully loaded. You can control it at this point, but it would rely on you knowing the pattern to complete the level in advance.

3) Musically the game is abysmal. A mix of light sci-fi space soundscapes and techno beats. I ended up muting it as it was very off putting for the type of game it is, and reminds me of the early experiments I made in FT2 and MPT nearly 20 years ago.

There was a lot of potential here, but the end result is a game that is really not that fun to play.

Game Acquisition: Purchased with Coupon
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 21 February 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Windows XP
Processor: Dual Core 2.0 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: HD 4650
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 300 MB available space
Additional Notes: There might be a problem with integrated graphics cards or some very old DX9 cards.