Kuchibi

Puzzle games, always a joy to review. I think there are more styles of play in puzzle games than any other genre, and more variation of opinion. (For example, I find Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo to be on the lower end of mediocre, while I’m painfully aware of its immense popularity.) Attempting to explain a puzzle game’s mechanics rarely gives a good glimpse of the experience of playing it. So, neither facts nor opinion are likely to be helpful.

Well, let’s give it a go and see where we come out…

First off, let’s get the basics out of the way. Kuchibi is well presented. There is no lack of audio or visual stimuli, nor are there effects obscuring play. Everything is crisp, clean, and professional looking. There’s even a color-blind mode, though I couldn’t tell what difference it made – there’s no color matching in the game. The controls are simple and they work seamlessly. The whole package is well put-together.

Kuchibi presents you with a grid of stones, on each stone is a segment of fuse, and you remove the stones by igniting the fuse. The farther the ignition travels before burning out, the more you score. Simple, so far.

There are only two types of fuse segments: straight and 90 degree corner. The corner segments have an odd behavior: if either end touches the end of a fuse on an adjacent stone, it becomes locked into place and cannot be flipped. This makes groups of corners essentially useless as they get stuck as they are. The straight segments can be flipped at any time, but if a flipped straight segment connects to another straight segment it ignites. This makes groups of straights essentially useless. So, the first challenge is to figure out how to do anything useful with these constraints.

After an extended period of feeling confused and impotent, Kuchibi finally clicked. This is the part where people say, “and from then on it was awesome fun,” or somesuch, but I’m afraid the game didn’t really do much for me. It never leaves you feeling stuck, and it gives you enough of a feeling of control to – well to attempt to control your fuses rather than just ignite whatever you see, but your attempts are so often interrupted that it can take twenty minutes just to build a “streak” from one side of the playfield to the other. Loops and “Kuchibis” (loops that enclose unconnected stones) are nigh on impossible to purposefully construct, and seem to only happen by noticing a chance arrangement of stones. And even then it’s not a Kuchibi if your Kuchibi-meter isn’t fully charged.

Even though it’s not my bag, puzzle game tastes run the gamut, so I’d recommend at least trying it until it “clicks” for you. Despite the mechanics being entirely different, it felt a lot like playing Hexic to me, so I’d especially recommend giving Kuchibi a shot if you’re a fan of that game. Which I’m not.

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