Kickle Cubicle (NES and Arcade Reviews)

Two in one review today and I’m going in the opposite order that I played them.

Kickle Cubicle
aka Meikyuu Jima
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released June 29, 1990
Developed by Irem
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Back in my first year of IGC, so many puzzle games were compared to an NES game called The Adventures of Lolo that I ended up buying it on the Wii Virtual Console. I liked Lolo a lot (a Definitive Review might be coming), and that led to recommendations of other Lolo-like games. One game that came up with semi-regularity was Kickle Cubicle. Years later, I sampled it while running through NES games and really liked the gameplay and thought “yep, this will be a contender for best NES puzzler.” And this is why sampling doesn’t work. Kickle Cubicle on the NES is way too easy. Unlike something like Lolo or Baba is You, once you get a feel for the logic of Kickle’s puzzle design and the limited amount of twists that can be done with it, all you have left is a solid sort-of action/sort-of puzzler. But maybe I’m not the target age. More on that later.

See the little blue blobs in the above puzzle? They’re your blocks. You have an unlimited freeze breath that turns them into ice cubes. Ice cubes pushed into the water permanently become land. The catch is an ice block can’t be pushed only one space ahead. They will always travel in a straight line until they either hit the water and become land or hit another fixture, such as a rock and stop. Your other superpower is the ability to create unlimited ice pillars that act as stoppers for the ice blocks. Their catch is that some of the spaces on the grid not only prevent the blue slime things from walking on them, but you can’t place pillars on these spaces either. Using your two magic ice tricks, their limitations, and a variety of environmental assists like hammers that you can manipulate to redirect the ice blocks and springs that bounce the ice blocks, you have to collect three magic bags to clear a stage. The main game has a whopping 67 levels, 4 bosses, and if you want, 30 additional bonus stages. But it wasn’t until the 17th level of the post-game stages (pictured below) that I actually had a puzzle that was a genuine head-scratcher, and really there were only a few more stages after I beat it that I struggled with.

I should note that Kickle Cubicle has an absurd amount of downtime. Upon completing each stage, you have to watch the level collapse into the water, wait for the game to count-up your bonus points (the points system being a relic of the coin-op that’s completely unnecessary for the home game), then you see a map screen which does nothing because the stages are linear, then it takes you to the next stage. Why is it like this? Well, because the Famicom version is non-linear. When you beat a stage, you have to manually float yourself to the next iceberg, select it (and not accidentally press the map button), and it’s just a slog. How could such a clever game have such a DUMB idea? So if you want a faster-paced version of the concept, play the coin-op. It offers more challenge anyway. In the slideshow below, you can see how many steps there are between levels.

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As for the levels themselves, maybe it’s because I beat the arcade version before I beat the NES game, but I found the puzzles in NES Kickle Cubicle to be among the easiest in any game I’ve ever played like this. Whether it be Lolo, Baba is You, Sokoban (aka Boxxle) or any other logic puzzler, the genre can be cracked by simply figuring out what the last move is and reverse engineering from there. Cubicle’s biggest problem is that the nature of its design usually makes the final move so self-evident that there’s not very much puzzle left. Because kicked blocks move in a straight path and don’t stop, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out. Unlike a game where you push blocks along a grid one space at a time like Baba or Lolo, “straight line” puzzlers like this or Slayaway Camp/Friday the 13th Killer Puzzle are among the easiest to reverse-engineer. Take this puzzle, and mind you, I’m writing this paragraph in real time as I play this level for the first time. This isn’t an early stage. This is Special Level 21 out of 30.

It’s actually a unique level because it’s only the second time a stage utilizes the idea of the hammer blocking your path. You can only push the hammer’s head from the sides. The little circles in the ice can’t be walked over or have a pillar placed on them, and the ice cubes don’t plug them up to become land. BUT, but the ice cubes will pass over them and continue on until they stop. My objective is to clear the path to the bags, but if I kick an ice block into the bottom hammer which will knock it into the top hammer, the bottom pathway becomes the one blocked by the hammer. There’s also a series of springs along the path. The final move is obvious, as I just need to be on the right side of the hammers when the ice cube strikes them. First, I do a single hammer cycle, then I push the block out of the way while it’s ricocheting off the spring (the only time you can push a moving block, as there’s a small window that allows it).

The red blocks shatter the ice if a moving block hits them on the pointy end. Now I just need to move the bottom hammer out of the way, and I do this by first moving the top hammer’s position. I want it facing upward.

The three rocks above the starting area will act as a way to catch the ice cube, then I kick the ice cube so that it begins to bounce off the springs.

Now I just have to avoid the ice cube and point the hammer down while the Cube is moving right to left, so that I have enough time to set the hammer and clear out of the way, since the hammer will kill you if you’re in the area around it when it’s activated. That part’s easy. I simply need to stand off to the right side and the path will be cleared.

And that’s it. Took me about five seconds to spot the “final move.” The rest is just following the steps that get there in reverse. “What’s the second-to-last move? What’s the move to get you there?” and so forth. And because of the mechanics, there’s not multiple different options for each of those steps. If you pause the game and work out from the last step, you should be able to eventually reach where Kickle is standing. There’s usually only one option with no branching paths. There’s very few levels in Kickle Cubicle where the final step is open-ended. It only has a couple gags it can go to in an effort to try to trip players up, but once you’ve done them once, you’ll immediately recognize the same puzzle design later on, and then there’s nothing left to “solve.” The very next stage looked daunting for about five seconds, but by ten seconds, I knew the solution because there’s only one space that can be the “final move” and, what do you know? Hanging right above it is an odd little cubby hole for you to hide in and a spring directly left of the space below it.

All that’s left is to move the block around, and since you can’t pull the block, it’s easy to figure out what sequence of gaps and walls are the correct one since one move usually places the block against a wall in a way where the block can’t be used.

The weird thing is, the arcade game had fewer basic enemy types and much tougher puzzle design. At one point, I spent a couple hours on-and-off on one puzzle in that game and couldn’t come up with a solution. Nothing like that happened on the NES game, whether I played the US or Japanese puzzles. Part of that might be the grid is much, MUCH smaller on the NES. In the home version, the grid is 15×13, compared to the massive 23×14 playfield of the coin-op. The toughest levels in the coin-op utilized the bigger screen. Not that it’s tightly designed, necessarily. I had three instances in the coin-op where I’m fairly certain that I beat a stage in a way not intended by the designers, including the final puzzle stage before the last boss, because I discovered that if you push the hammers at the exact right moment, it’ll stop the block without harming you OR redirecting the block. That trick doesn’t work on the NES, by the way, but I still had two instances where I know I won in a way not intended. In the screenshots below, I never even used the bottom right hammer but the little bomb enemy pushed the final bag to within my reach. The actual final move was to use that hammer to hit the cube up to make a land bridge. When I noticed the bomb was moving the bag to the right of the screen, I wondered if I could cheese the design, and I could.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m taking a dump on Kickle Cubicle for the NES, because I genuinely think it’s a quality game. It’s just not a particularly challenging game for me. I think the average puzzle fan will massacre this game, but if not for the absurd gap between stages, I don’t think they’d get bored. Plus, Kickle NES does offer some challenges the coin-op doesn’t. Enemies like clowns that throw balls at you or sparks that bounce around and have to be avoided aren’t in the coin-op. The sparks especially have some of the more difficult levels because they’re based around timing and feel more like the type of challenge that Lolo had. The four bosses are also very different from the coin-op. The fights are much more basic. They throw a giant ice cube at you that becomes the ammo you push back at them, and you avoid their charging moves and shove cubes into them. The coin-op’s bosses are much more clever (until the final boss, who has the classic attack pattern of “spam basic enemies and projectiles until dead.”), but the fights are fun enough. As a warning, the Famicom version’s bosses take more hits and the fights become kind of boring for it.

Just don’t expect this to stretch your gray matter to the limits. If you want a real challenge, you’ll need something like Lolo or Baba is You. The stages that are truly mind bending are few and far between, at least in the home game. On the NES, I never had a single moment where I got stuck and then felt stupid because the solution was so obvious. But there is an audience I think Kickle will be perfect for: young people. The puzzles featured in Kickle Cubicle feel like they’re perfect to introduce children, say, 8 to 14, to the logic puzzle genre. Calling this “baby’s first puzzler” is too extreme. This isn’t Highlights for Children. It’s a step above that, but an important step. I hope my friends at ININ Games and Irem are reading this, because they should seriously consider a re-release for Kickle Cubicle as a two-in-one package. You might want to also consider ROM-hacking in some new levels. I actually would have added a Kickle ROM hack to this feature but apparently none exist. So, before I render a verdict, let’s jump to the coin-op!

Kickle Cubicle
aka Meikyuu Jima
Platform: Arcade
Released June, 1988
Designed by Hiroya Kita
Developed by Irem
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (?)

There’s a strong chance you’ve never played the coin-op of Kickle Cubicle since it never was released outside of Japan. Now, while I briefly sampled the NES game about a half-decade ago, this review was originally supposed to be for just the coin-op since I figured it had a better chance at a re-release. When I turned on the NES game later, the levels seemed similar but there was no sense of urgency like there is for the arcade version. I mean that in the literal sense too, as the timer in the coin-op feels like it runs a lot faster. I timed-out exactly once while playing the NES game and it was very, very late in the special levels. For the arcade game? I timed out quite a few times.

Now part of that can probably be attributed to getting my sea legs. There’s a formula to the type of puzzles you see in Kickle Cubicle and during my playthrough with the coin-op, I hadn’t experienced every twist there is to using the springs, hammers, or the chicken enemies. The chickens are part of the NES game too and sometimes mess up your progress by kicking the block, but at other times, they’re part of the puzzle and you have to figure out how to manipulate them into doing an out-of-reach kick for you. The other possible excuse is that the humongous playfield (again, 23×14) makes it harder to reverse engineer the path to that final move. Plus, the timer changes depending on the stage, and I had to remind myself this is a coin-op and it’s probably quite cross with me for not dying more than I did. To my credit, a lot of the levels aren’t “puzzles” in the usual sense. Like this:

In that level, the chickens create a timing-based gauntlet for you to run. There’s a fast-moving spike at the end of the path that’s trapped by an ice block, but the ice blocks will eventually melt if you don’t keep them frozen with your breath. It’s the timer within a timer because if you take too much time, the block will melt and the spike will kill you. Okay, levels like this don’t really fit in with the puzzle theme and are probably a feeble attempt to drain lives since the level up to this point haven’t exactly been challenging. Here’s another stage like, where once you shove the block, you have to run the full circumference of the playfield before the hammers hit the ice cube back into you.

My question is “why is this a coin-op?” This is not a genre that should be played using quarters and standing at a cabinet. The coin-op does have four tiers of adjustable difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Hardest. I played on whatever the default was once, then after playing the NES game I went back to the coin-op and tried it on HARDEST. It added a couple extra enemies and the timer seemed shorter than before, but I also got more 1-ups when I beat bosses than before. Even the bosses didn’t seem harder. Speaking of which, they’re a lot different from the NES game. The four NES bosses are cute and solid for the genre, but they’re kind of samey. The bosses in the coin-op each feel unique. They’re not fantastic battles or anything, but I prefer the coin-op’s to the NES’s.

The weird thing is, you’d expect the coin-op to have a bigger variety of enemies and the NES game to have a tighter focus on the puzzles themselves, but actually it’s the opposite. The clowns, turtles, cannons, and guys invincible snowmen that also have freeze breath from the NES game are not here. There’s also a couple more levels that are based around what I call “intercepting” puzzles than in the NES game, probably thanks to the bigger playfield size. This was as hard as the game gets. The idea is that the place you need to create a bridge is completely inaccessible with walls or pillars, so you have to cause two ice cubes to collide from opposite directions to line them up with the spot where you can create the bridge. Getting the timing down, even when they’re usually generous with the size of the area where a bridge can be made, is tricky.

I think the problem with the arcade game is that it takes too long to warm-up. It’s not until you’re halfway done with the game that the level design really starts to feel like it leans heavily into puzzles and not a meager top-down action game with puzzle elements. For the last half of Kickle Cubicle, there are some decent brain teasers to be found, and the game is generous. You can continue if you game over (there might be a limit to this but I opted for save states instead of lives) and, unique to the coin-op, progress carries over between lives. If you die, your next life will be played with all the land you’ve created still intact, even on the hardest setting. The NES version makes you start over from scratch. The arcade version also controls perfectly, while the NES version has one minor issue with the timing of placing a pillar. If you’re moving while you attempt to place it, you’ll step onto the square and cancel it out. Otherwise, both versions control intuitively and responsively. The arcade game is probably the better bet for puzzle veterans, though be prepared to need thirty minutes before you reach the really meaty puzzles. If you play both the arcade and NES games, you’ll see plenty of look-alike puzzles, but they play different enough to make experiencing both versions worthwhile.

While I personally preferred the coin-op, I had a hunch that Irem, intentionally or otherwise, created the perfect entry-level logic puzzler for kids ages 8 to 13 with the NES game. I wanted to test that, and I had the perfect subject. We’re working on a big pinball feature for The Pinball Chick, but yesterday Sasha The Kid, on the verge of turning 10, gave me a little bit of her time to try out Kickle. It’s not entirely her first puzzler since she’s got Baba is You on her Switch, though she hadn’t really gotten into it. Maybe I got it for her at too young an age. I thought Kickle would make a better starting point for her. You know what? She liked it a lot, and I can’t express how satisfying it was to see her work out the solutions to the puzzles, store the solutions in her memory, and start to clear stages at an impressively faster pace. She also proved my theory that Kickle is a better starting point for puzzlers. As I was writing this, she was giving Baba is You a second look without me even asking her to, and Aunt Cathy was wiping tears. So, you know, thanks for that, Kickle Cubicle.
Verdict: YES! and YES!