![]() When I compare it to another new puzzle game like Pushmo World, MouseCraft comes up short. ![]() It gets better over time as the levels in MouseCraft become larger and more complex. See, I first got excited about MouseCraft after seeing a trailer for the game: Waiting for all those moving parts to come together into a single, unified whole is…sort of boring. But it also captures something else, something that I think I chose to forget. MouseCraft captures a lot of that charm I remember being struck by when playing Lemmings. The fun comes from the exhilarating feeling of constructing a Rube Goldberg machine on the fly, trying to keep all the moving parts together in a delicate balance just long enough for at least one of the rodents to make it across the finish line. And you can only do this by manipulating the terrain of the level - erecting barriers and bridges, or detonating little bombs to remove those same structures, until the mice have made their way to the cheese. It’s your job to usher the mice to safety. Then they will bump into the wall and start walking in the opposite direction. The only way to stop them is to put a wall in front of the ledge. If they walk towards a ledge, they will fall off the ledge - even if it means falling to their death. No matter what you do, they pace back and forth across the level, heedless of any imminent danger they might be walking into. ![]() What makes it challenging is that you don’t exercise direct control over the mice. The core objective of MouseCraft, like the Lemmings games of yore, is steering a group of cute little animals (mice, in this case) through a level. But playing through its puzzles over the past few days has forced me to come to terms with a hard truth: maybe Lemmings went away because it wasn’t actually as good as I thought it was in the first place. It’s a perfectly good game that hits the right notes - at least when it comes to paying homage to its predecessors. And not because MouseCraft does anything wrong. Plus, you play as a cat scientist named Schrödinger. The thought of playing something that revived not one, but two nostalgia-riddled games was too good to pass up. I was intrigued by the concept developer Crunching Koalas billed it as a combination of Tetris and Lemmings. I got an unpleasant answer this week in the form of a new indie game called MouseCraft. People never stopped loving any of the games, however, which made their sudden absence all the more mysterious. The same could be said for Myst, Pac-Man, even Tetris. It’s hard to pinpoint when or why this happened, but Lemmings lost pace with the modern video game industry. The lemmings were all just so cute and helpless! And hey, the puzzles weren’t so bad either. Many of my earliest memories of being enthralled by a computer screen come from solving these puzzles. It was that cute puzzle game from the nineties about shepherding herds of the titular critters to safety.
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