August 27, 2023 - Day 239 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 259

Game: Crumble

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 5, 2020
Library Date: Dec 25, 2022
Unplayed: 245d (8m2d)
Playtime: 15m

Crumble is a 3D physics platformer, where you play as a slime, rolling around on, and jumping between platforms, and using your ridiculously long tongue like a web shooter to swing from place to place.

I haven't clock-watched a game for a while. Even Golden Light got 22 minutes out of me.

After 4 minutes in this game I was watching the clock.

I spent a further 11 minutes trying to get past one single section of platforms.

On the first level.

The thing is, when you get your momentum up, and have things to swing from, I can understand where this might almost achieve something that could be described as almost, but not quite, entirely unlike fun.

With apologies to Douglas Adams, whose name I have besmirched just by associating his words with this game.

At its core, this is part platformer, part grappling game, and the grapple requires momentum to function.

There's no "reel-in" function to the grapple-tongue, to allow you to build up momentum, either (a la Just Cause et al.).

If you can't get momentum up, and your timing & coordination isn't almost perfect?

Well, sucks to be me.

At least you can target the grappling point, right? Why do that? It might add some sense of fun and enjoyment to this torture. The tongue wants what the tongue wants, and rarely did the tongue and I agree on what it should stick to.

In addition, even when I was close to getting something resembling success, the camera would suddenly clip through the environment, and I'd be disoriented as to where I was trying to go.

When I added it to the bundle in Christmas, it seemed like fun. Poor, delusional, past Allie. The most joy I got from this game was "Quit to Desktop".

People have, miraculously, completed this game. Maybe, in the eternal words of Detective Roger Murtaugh, "I'm getting too old for this shit."

Crumble is a crumbly:

1: Nope