The Adventures of Shuggy review

Spare a thought for Shuggy, because his antic creators have brought him into the world surrounded by a perfect storm of glittering self-sabotage. Along with that forgettable name (The Adventures of Shaggy? Of Shigsy?) and a cumbersome, if well-intentioned, level selection UI, Smudged Cat Games has opted for a graphical style of such unrelenting clip-art blandness that your body may physically reject it on first sighting. Steady yourself: if you can get past the menu interface and go beyond the visuals, a leaderboard scramble of peculiar invention awaits.

The Adventures of Shuggy is a 2D platformer that isn’t afraid to rewrite its entire rulebook on a room-by-room basis. Fundamental mechanics, interactive items, even that most precious of a jumping game’s commodities, the weight and height of your leap itself, can and will be thrown into flux in order to create a suite of increasingly complex challenges. The only fixed point in Shuggy’s perilous universe, in fact, is the ultimate objective: clear each chamber of its sparkling jewels while avoiding any spikes and monsters.

Onto that template, then, Smudged Cat Games throws anything and, frequently, everything. There are switches and locks, there are rooms that rotate, there are Indian rope tricks, AI partners and even deployable transporter beams. Shuggy invokes classics like Mario with sudden shifts in size and perspective, and pays its dues to more recent games like The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom with an elegantly brutal time-looping mechanic that often sees you fighting for space with deadly – yet potentially useful – clones of yourself as a level progresses. There’s a name for this kind of ‘borrowing’. That said, it’s hard to stay angry when a game is so dedicated to creatively embellishing the loot it has made off with.

And while its character art may be fairly weak, Shuggy’s soundtrack is a luxurious pleasure, with the excellent work of Jesse Hopkins invoking everything from Ragtime tunes to the classy domestic chills of The Addams Family. It’s rich and thoughtful stuff, and provides each new location you unlock throughout the game’s haunted mansion with a distinct and quietly creepy sense of place. Better yet, it somehow manages to sound just as good on your ninth run at an end of level boss as it did the first time around.

The Adventures of Shuggy presents the player with both logic and twitch challenges – and the latter can sometimes lead to problems. Shuggy’s fiddly character design, all bat ears and flowing cape, makes it hard to tell where his hit-box actually begins and ends, making the already iffy collision detection genuinely frustrating. Meanwhile, the difficulty curve bucks and shudders wildly in the face of so many shifting mechanics, and never really settles down.

What will win you over in spite of all that, and in spite of the sub-Beano art design, is the thrifty intricacy of some of the game’s best levels, and its hard-won craftiness when it comes to repurposing ideas before they go stale. Shuggy’s a clever game rather than a truly smart one – a smart game wouldn’t do half as much to undermine itself along the way – but it’s still worth sticking with to its bitter and infuriating end. [7]