Adventures of Shuggy is a very, very frustrating game.
In the game, you take the role of ‘Shuggy’, who seems to be a purple vampire bat thingy, and attempt to solve various different puzzles in your attempt to repair the Mansion you’re in. By completing each puzzle, you gain a key, and you need to collect a certain amount of these to progress into the next area of the mansion, to repair the next problem. Now, you may be thinking, “Oh, just another puzzle game.â€, but I can assure you it’s much more than that.
To give you an idea of the scale and difficulty of this game, I’ve been playing for nearly a week, and still not managed to finish the 116 single-player levels. Many sessions have resulted in me angrily switching off my Xbox, so if you buy this… be prepared.
Each puzzle you play in the mansion has a unique twist, some stages you play, you’ll have to rotate the stage itself to collect all the gems, guide little creatures in order to smash crates containing the necessary gems, step on switches then wait for time to rewind so a ghost of yourself steps on that same switch, enabling you to get past an initially locked door, and many many more confusingly hard challenges. What’s worse is, as you progress, each challenge will get harder and harder, as well as offering even more complex variations. One challenge that has particularly stuck in my head, is trying to step on 8 switches at once with my ghosts, whilst rotating the level. I still haven’t been able to do it.
At the end of each area, you are introduced to a boss, of sorts, which is the broken part of the mansion. For example, in the first area, ‘The Boiler Room’, the boss fight is with the boiler. As strange as it may sound, these actually work well. Again, the puzzle element comes back into these (you can’t escape it!), with the first fight, you have to step on switches using your ghosts, to ‘cool down’ the boiler, whilst avoiding the flames it spits out. These fights seem very Megaman-esque, solving a small puzzle to continually damage the boss, even the style of the bosses look very similar. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as they still do offer quite a challenge, and much more of a challenge than any Megaman sub-bosses.
However, whilst playing through this game, with tears in your eyes, the look doesn’t help cheer you up. Shuggy is very good looking. The character himself, is an abstract, humanoid bad, which, although he doesn’t speak, seems to put his personality across to the player. Also , any character or enemy that appears also has a very detailed and quirky style, which again looks very good indeed. However, the stages are quite bland. Each area you enter offers a new environment; however that really doesn’t differ any further than different coloured bricks. Then once you’re within that area, each stage sticks with the same theme, only changing the layout. Seeing flat purple for over 30 minutes gets fairly tedious. The overall style of the game is kinda brought down by the lack of colour, and vibrancy in the stages, and the appearance of great looking enemies and characters isn’t really enough to brighten it up.
Also offered in the game is multiplayer, so, just picture the difficulty of the game, then throw in another three people, and some incomprehensibly hard challenges… yeah. Just; don’t try it without a microphone.
Overall, Adventures of Shuggy is a very clever and fun game, which offers a lot of content, especially for an XBLA game. This is ideal for playing alone, but also for playing with your friends, as you laugh, and laugh as you tremendously fail each puzzle. I definitely recommend this game, mainly if you’re looking for one heck of a challenge.
