Poor old Shuggy. Our peppy little purple vampire bat with the incredibly cute name doesn't seem to have much luck lately. Having inherited a castle from his recently deceased uncle, he must have thought he was quids in - but it turns out this castle's no holiday home. Packed to the creaking rafters with goblins, ghouls, wasps, and over a hundred mind-bendingly difficult puzzles that need to be solved, there's a lot of work to be done before Shuggy can move in for good. Luckily, he's not the kind of bat to back down from a challenge - and this is where you come in.
It's hard to describe quite what The Adventures of Shuggy is, as what you have to do seems to change with pretty much every level. Part pixel-perfect platform game, part mind-bending puzzle, it's up to you to collect the gems that are scattered about each room - but how you do that varies hugely. With challenges ranging from simply hopping from platform to platform, dodging the odd, infuriatingly placed enemy as you go, to attempting to navigate a room that rotates on its own every few seconds, rolling you around with it, there are no two rooms that can be tackled the same way, meaning you'll have to adapt on the fly. Or bat.
Easy.
But while it may look like a children's game (and featuring a character with a name as cute as Shuggy, we're surprised it isn't), Shuggy's actually a game that's been aimed squarely at adults. While a child may manage the first few levels, this is a game that gets very hard, very quickly, and precision platforming skills are required to tame the overly bouncy jumps of the enthusiastic Shuggy.
In fact, the controls are one of the more awkward parts of the game - which is a bit of a bum deal for a precision platformer. Accelerating from 0 to the other side of the screen in a few milliseconds, moving Shuggy around with the precision required can be quite a challenge in itself, especially when even a slight tap of the A button is enough to make Shuggy leap twice his height. When the game asks you to time your jump perfectly, and slot yourself through the tiny gap between two enemies, controls are of the utmost importance - but Shuggy's not quite up to scratch.
If anything, Shuggy moving a little bit slower would have fitted in with the rest of the game's pace a lot better, as this isn't the kind of game you can just whizz through in a few seconds. Faced with a room full of gems, you'll often have to sit around trying to work out the best way to approach it, or even trying to get your head around how it works - especially as many levels can only be done in a specific way. A case in point is an early level, that gives you three Shuggies, each affected by a different field of gravity - one that can run up walls on the left, one that runs across the floor, like a normal bat-thing would, and one that runs up walls on the right. Switching between the three by using the right trigger, each bat can reach different gems - but they can also all get stuck in different areas, unable to reach the ledge to jump out. Working out which way to push the stick to get them to move is tricky enough, yet alone trying to keep an eye out for any potential pitfalls, so you'll need to think things through before you get started.
Watch out!
And there's such a huge variety of ways to complete every puzzle, it can take quite a bit of thinking. One level sees you pressing the right trigger to rotate the room in the direction Shuggy's facing, which causes the gems to fall around a maze. It's up to you to bring the gems to you by rotating the room - oh, but there's one small problem. You're in a room with spikes covering the walls - and if you touch them, it's game over. With a precious few bricks forming tiny platforms you can stand on, you'll have to rotate the room, whilst figuring out where you'll have to leap in order to make Shuggy jump to the right platform.
One of the most annoying mechanics, however, has to be the strange timer, which records your moves and, when it reaches zero, creates a "ghost" version of Shuggy, which retraces the moves you've just taken. Incredibly useful, as it lets you press two switches with just one bat, it's also somewhat infuriating, as if you come into contact with your ghost, your Shuggy will disappear in a puff of green mist, and it's game over. Later levels make things even harder, by having so many switches, you have to create loads of ghost versions of yourself - and the game then repeatedly asks you to go from one side of the level to the other, avoiding the numerous ghost versions that are running around the level. What it means is, if you plan in advance, and track what all eight or so version of yourself are doing, you may, possibly, manage to leave an open track through the level - but more likely than not, you'll find yourself inadvertently blocking yourself in on the one side of the level. Sigh.
Pulleys. We can't even begin to explain what's going on here.
It's a game that seems to thrive on being evil, and providing you with the sort of challenges that only the most masochistic puzzle solvers would want to take on. Luckily, the single player offers you a choice of levels, so if there's a real stinker, you should be able to avoid it - but of course, that can only last for so long. The co-op mode, on the other hand, which offers over 30 levels for two players to take on together is so hard, it's not even really worth looking at unless you've both finished the main game. We got stuck on what was effectively the third level, which saw one player having to stand on a switch to move a platform, while several enemies annoyingly fly towards you, often trapping you so there's nowhere to go.
In fact, this is a problem with the majority of Shuggy. While a challenging game isn't a problem, there's a fine line between being a challenge, and being unfair. With Shuggy's infuriating mix of enemies that home in on you, and offer you nowhere to go, puzzles that end in one way trips to your death, and strange controls, there are plenty of levels that simply seem to have been designed from their outset to be annoying.
With 116 levels on offer, it can never be said that the Adventures of Shuggy doesn't offer value for money - but how many of these levels you'll actually manage to do depends a lot on your patience, and your skill. If you sit and think every level through, you should manage to make progress - but then there are levels that don't let you even sit around and think. One of the later levels gives you five Shuggies, which all have wasps flying towards them in a straight line. You have all of a few seconds to switch between them all, and drop them down off the platforms. With a few more seconds to react, this would have been challenging - but with the miniscule amount of time it gives you, it's just frustrating.
Which is somewhat sad, really. Shuggy certainly has appeal as a character, and the whole concept for the game is great. We love the idea of solving puzzles, we love the idea of really having to think about things, and truth be told, we love a good challenge - but in the end, you just end up being left with the impression that the game's being unfair for the sake of being unfair.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
