The Adventures of Shuggy

Developer’s Site || Steam Page

Nothing quite embodies the spirit of Halloween like an adorable vampire bat cleaning ghosts out of his newly inherited mansion. The Adventures of Shuggy consists of well over 100 short, often single-screen puzzle platforming challenges as Shuggy makes his way across his mansion room-by-room to fix one otherworldly conundrum after another. The goal of each stage is to collect every green gem and completing a stage will open the doors to one or more stages around it, but the real brilliance behind this game’s design is in its sheer sense of variety. Shuggy can’t do anything beyond jumping by default, but new mechanics and changes to the rules constantly appear. Sometimes the entire stage can be rotated at the push of a button, other times you have access to a portable teleporter, in yet other cases Shuggy may need to swing from a rope or use a rope to turn gears, and in other stages still you may need to switch between members of an entire Shuggy team. The list of ways in which this game plays with and adds to its own rules goes on and on and, while each region may have one or two particular gimmicks which it focuses on, The Adventures of Shuggy frequently finds new and surprising uses for old mechanics. All the right notes are hit in terms of progression as well; respawning is nearly instantaneous, a brief and sufficient bit of tutorial text is shown whenever a new mechanic is introduced, and stage progression allows for plenty of leeway if a level is too hard or if you just don’t care for a particular gimmick. There is only one significant issue with this game, but it’s a rather scary one – it sometimes doesn’t save your progress and there have even been reports of save files being outright deleted in some cases. If you don’t mind the risk of losing your progress (or if you think you can get through all the content in one session), then this game makes for a whimsically charming, clever, and all-around solid Halloween adventure.

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