Rating:

A puzzle game that plays like Tetris, but instead of building a line, you build a path upwards for our little red friend here, while avoiding getting him crushed beneath the falling bricks. A very simple and fun game betrayed by too steep a learning curve.

Additional Info

Full Review

Crushd is an interesting experiment created by Jonathan Whiting that challenges your idea of a Tetris-like. It maintains the traditional falling-bricks-in-a-well formula, but introduces several innovative twists to the original gameplay. The game plays by having you click on bricks to break them. This mechanic applies for both the bricks that are falling and those that are already on the ground. The falling bricks are being lowered into the well by a rope - if you separate bricks from the rope support by destroying the connecting bricks, the isolated bricks will crash down to the ground below quickly.

The ultimate twist in this game is the presence of a little red cube that walks to and fro horizontally across the bottom of the well. This cube is able to climb over cliffs of 1 block tall, but if it meets a wall of 2 blocks or higher, it will turn around and walk the other way. Therefore, the trick of the game is to keep building "steps" for this little dude so it can keep climbing higher and higher out of the well. This gets even more tricky when the well starts to flood after you attained a threshold score. Falling into the water drowns the red dude, and every time the red dude dies, some blocks get destroyed, causing you start even closer to drowning the next time.

Apparently, the difficulty of this game is not to be underestimated. This game proves to be very daunting for a beginner like me, who gets easily trapped in a never-ending cycle of dying and then respawning in a position close to dying again. The mechanic of destroying key bricks to make blocks land where you want them to takes some getting used to, and before you get comfortable with that, the well starts to flood, effectively doubling the difficulty of the game. A possible way to ease this steep learning curve might be to introduce flooding at a later stage or have it triggered not by score, but by the red dude's height - so there will be some distance between you and the water to cushion yourself into the new challenge.

The graphics and music have a retro, 8-bit aesthetic to them, complete with scan-lines to emulate the rendering properties of an old CRT monitor. The developer even made an effort to create faint after-images to the left of all sprites, creating the illusion of a glitchy and slightly malfunctioning screen. This presentation gives a strange charm to this simple little game that might not work as well for something else.

If you are prepared to spend some time dying and learning this game, it is definitely worth a look-see. The game is browser playable with the Adobe Flash Player at this website.