Given the price though the download is well worth both your time and money and, after fellow eShop games such as Zen Pinball 3D and Pullblox, we hope a sign of a regular stream of similarly offbeat games to come. We were still left wanting more and although there is the challenge of trying to complete a level under a specific time that’s the only other extracurricular activity in the game.

Once you start to tune into the game’s devious logic the only real fault with the game is that there are only 16 levels, which is perhaps why WayForward dispensed with any time-wasting training ones. That’s never the case though and like any good puzzle game every solution is followed by a muttered curse of ‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’ And that’s despite us more than once becoming convinced that we were impossibly stuck in one of the maze-like levels. The controls are precise and responsive though and you’ve never got anyone to blame for failure other than yourself. The latter is never particularly tricky on its own, but when you’re trying to switch blocks as you jump it requires a pretty intense level of concentration by the later levels. The game doesn’t bother to explain any of this to you, it doesn’t even say what the buttons do unless you read the virtual manual, but although the difficultly curve is probably a bit too steep we enjoyed the excitement of working things out for ourselves.Īlthough the block switching is the most important mechanic the game is presented as a 2D platformer and shooting and jumping also play their part in the game. Very quickly though the game ramps up the complications with blocks that act like launch pads for both you and enemies, blocks that you can lock in position by jumping on them, and more. At first this simply involves switching ordinary blocks from the foreground to the background, using them as stepping stones to higher areas or squishing enemies caught in the switch over (which produces one of the best 3D effects we’ve seen on the 3DS).

This is clearly nonsense and so is the main gameplay gimmick: the ability of Patricia to switch the location of onscreen blocks between two alternate positions.

Aliens infestation sprites