385th played so far
Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Wii
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: fyto
Publisher: Nintendo
After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the eleventh game, You, Me & The Cubes, one of the games we didn’t want to miss.
You, Me & The Cubes always seemed like an interesting game, from the first time I saw it on the list. While perhaps not high priority, it was a game I wanted to play, and one of the reasons I didn’t just want to ignore the games we lost with the second edition.
The game – as so many puzzle games – starts simple. You have a cube, or multiple cubes merged together, hanged balanced in nothingness. You throw small humans called Fallos on it, two at a time. Their weight acts on the cubes and moves it, and you need to keep the cubes balanced so they don’t fall off. Each game, your goal is to get one Fallos on each cube and to get a certain number of them on the whole thing, with none sliding off for a few seconds.
This is tricky enough on its own – while with a single cube the balance is quite easy to predict, the interplay between cubes can be more difficult to guess correctly once different heights get involved and the requirement to have at least one Fallos on each cube means you can’t just cluster them all around one spot. This is made trickier by the Fallos themselves. They’ll start wandering around the cube, partially trying to help your balance, but just as often throwing you off.
Then the special bonuses come in. White Fallos appear occasionally. Rather than helping you, they walk around trying to unbalance your cubes and throwing other Fallos off. The cubes themselves start changing as well down the line.
Just as much fun is multiplayer. The basic concept stayed the same, but instead of having to send two Fallos at once, you do it one at a time. This makes balancing more difficult, unless you manage to coordinate with your fellow player. White Fallos are replaced by others that require both players to work together to remove them. It got frustrating at times, but as a multiplayer co-op mode it works really well as a better challenge.
It’s a pretty good concept, fun to play with, and while the graphics are somewhat simplistic, they are functional. It’s clearly an indie download-only game, but if anything, that means you can focus on the puzzle solving more than on everything surrounding it.