Sugar, Sugar is straightforward, economical and surprisingly dynamic. It’s a game about catching sugar crystals is a series of mugs, and it’s designed around experimentation, refinement and freedom of approach. Now it’s also designed around Christmas, with the game’s Belgian developer Bart Bonte unveiling a new suite of festive levels in which you work your way past fir trees, hanging baubles, and reindeer in order to complete each stage.
The game’s pretty simple, really: sugar pours in from the top of the screen, and your job is to draw lines that will direct the flow of powder towards its target. Often, there will be more than one target, meaning you’ll have to split the sugar up on the way. Sometimes, there will even be colour-coded targets, so you’ll need to push the sugar through filters to tint it first.
The further you progress through the game, the more the ideas start to pile up. Anti-gravity mechanics encourage you to spin levels on their heads, and some challenges that will only work when you realise that the game screen wraps around, meaning that sugar that falls out the bottom of a level will eventually emerge at the top again. It can be surprisingly tricky at times: with no undo button, each mistake means you’ll either have to start the level from scratch, or try to work around your error, adding yet more lines and contrivances, and sending that sugar on increasingly wayward journeys.
The further you progress, the more the sugar starts to pile up, too, and it’s this element that really saves the game from life as just another clever Flash puzzler and transforms it into something a lot more playful. Sugar, Sugar’s physics system is wonderfully convincing, and if you leave each screen running, you’ll start to see the sugar heap and collapse in interesting ways. It collects in valleys, spills over ledges, and occasionally triggers mini-landslides. While the flow of sugar always stops long before each level is entirely filled up with the stuff, there’s generally just enough of it to ensure that meeting the central requirement for each stage is rarely the source of the game’s real fun. Instead, you may find that you just want to see what the sugar can do as it falls, and how much of the environment you can bury in it.
Simple as it is, Sugar, Sugar delivers the same tinkering pleasures that you can get from a game like From Dust. It offers the absent-minded kind of fun that comes from messing around in a closed system governed by very simple rules, and then watching what happens after you’ve introduced a few changes. In Eric Chahi’s god game, those changes would often include painting in entire mountain ranges using lumps of bubbling lava. Here, you’re generally just sketching in a wonky ski-slope or two. It’s all a little more modest, in other words, but the end result is often just as fascinating to watch.