Challenge yourself with Chuzzle

Chuzzles, n. – “Googly-eyed little balls of fur that giggle, squeak, and sneeze as you push them.”

What’s not to love about a cast of squeaking, sneezing, “googly-eyed” characters that challenge you to quickly solve a variety of puzzles? More enticing than bubble wrap – chuzzles pop when you win – Chuzzle is a fun game that can keep you entertained for hours.

Chuzzles is effectively four games in one, providing different modes of play.

The first, Classic Chuzzle, is perhaps the simplest. The playing screen contains a grid of chuzzles. Drag horizontal and vertical rows with your stylus or move them with the navigation keys. The goal is to get three or more identical chuzzles next to each other. They’ll get excited and when you release the stylus, pop enthusiastically.

Popped chuzzles fall into the flask. When you’ve filled the flask, you advance to the next level where things get slightly more difficult. There are specialized chuzzles, including a new rainbow variety, locked rows, and fat chuzzles that appear when you pop four in a square. This is where game play turns from making lucky guesses to requiring a more strategic approach. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing twenty fluffy little creatures explode in perfect harmony while the score climbs ever-higher!

Once you’ve mastered the classic mode, try your hand at the time trials. You have a limited amount of time to pop all the chuzzles you can. Miss any and that row and column is locked, making further play substantially more difficult.

Throughout the game, there’s a hint system to point you in the right direction—unless you’re playing Mind Bender; then you’ll have to figure it out for yourself. Usually, you can find the solution by sitting back and thinking about it, though it can be extremely frustrating to stare at just one out of place chuzzle with no hint to set you straight.

Keep motivated by collecting trophies. Not only do you pick them up for simple goals (for example, popping 10,000 chuzzles), but you can also collect trophies for causing giant cascades, completing levels without using hints, and more humorous ones such as for sparing all the fat chuzzles in a game.

Graphically, the game is gorgeous, with native VGA support and bright, cheerful colors. All the animations are top notch and the sound effects and background music are just varied enough to not become tedious. The level of detail is quite astonishing: tap on a chuzzle and it’ll giggle; keep tapping and it’ll start to get angry; really annoy it and it will explode in a small cloud of hair, returning completely bald. Leave them alone and they’ll fall asleep, while others will spontaneously appear wearing sunglasses.

A particularly nice touch is option for those who are color-blind. As you might imagine, a game where you match colors is a bit difficult when you can’t differentiate between them. This mode replaces the different colors with different symbols.

The only problem with the game is the lack of documentation. When you launch each game mode for the first time you’re presented with a brief explanation of how to play. Unfortunately, Chuzzle has so many depths and levels of play that many times you stumble across a rule or feature you’d never have imagined existed. An excellent example of this is the rainbow chuzzle. It took me some time to realize that this isn’t, in fact, a wildcard. Instead, it’s a particularly high scoring chuzzle – something I discovered only after combining a few of them together. The purpose of the Zen Chuzzle wasn’t clear until I contacted customer support.

Documentation aside, Chuzzle is one of those games that keeps you coming back for more. While you can play it as nothing more than a stress reliever, it’s not unusual to find yourself sitting down for more involved sessions, planning every move in advance. With the different puzzle types and trophy challenges, I have no doubt that I’ll still be playing Chuzzle a long time from now.