Puzzle games are a dime a dozen. Most of them are garbage time fillers, especially since the genre has gotten big on mobile. For example, my wife plays a mobile Toy Story puzzle game that’s rigged to force microtransactions with a high difficulty curve. She refuses to pay, which is awesome, but most people don’t, hence the wild success of games like Candy Crush Saga. On consoles, puzzle games are usually either incredibly tough or a casual affair, often turning out unbalanced with extended play. Few games reach the pinnacle that Tetris or Puyo Puyo have managed. Oddly enough, Crawlco Block Knockers, a racy indie game from new studio Cosmi Kankei and publisher EastAsiaSoft, might have the chops to wow you.
Crawlco Block Knockers is not a subtle game. Your goal is to move blocks around a warehouse in order to merge them together to reveal risque (and occasionally topless) pictures of women. There’s no illusion here, this is a game for pubescent teens to see boobs. However, aside from that one issue, the gameplay itself is absolutely fantastic! Why Cosmi Kankei chose to put the nudity in is beyond me because without that, the game would have a much higher appeal to casual gamers and the hardcore alike. It’s honestly a detraction from the extremely challenging and satisfying design of the game itself.
There’s not much plot here. You’ve been hired to rearrange a warehouse by a weird monster. For some reason, the warehouse is full of creatures as well and you’re an odd lizard creature yourself. In fact, the only humans in the game are the girls you uncover by matching blocks inside the designated areas. Regardless, you’re dropped into a warehouse and your shift starts. Blocks of pink, green, and blue (there are also other visual options for the blocks) begin to appear at random and you need to match up three or more at a time. Match them against the walls or other completed block sets that are touching the walls and they solidify. Do so within the designated area and you reveal an image beneath. Of course, this sounds easier than it is, especially since you can get cornered by enemies while you’re working.
The mechanics of Crawlco are interesting. On the surface, it vaguely resembles Shove It!: The Warehouse Game for the Sega Genesis or perhaps the old Atari arcade game, Pengo. You kick or push blocks to move them into place. However, there are more complex mechanics at work here. You can kick blocks in straight lines until they hit something, and if they happen to slide across another brick as it is forming, the new brick shatters. You can also pull bricks around to where you need them, but you can’t push them forward. You can hop up on completed sections of the puzzle as well, allowing you to avoid enemies, run around and drop down on a different section of the screen to solve puzzles. Finally, you can grab a brick, press the kick button while holding the pull button and kick it behind you as you jump over it, a handy way to get out of a bind! Kick a brick into an enemy and the enemy is destroyed, solidifying the bricks around them and completing more of the puzzle, but if you’re not careful, you’ll create holes that can’t be filled. The gameplay quickly becomes complex in Crawlco Block Knockers and will challenge even the most hardcore puzzle fans, and on the Switch, the controls are tight and responsive once you get the hang of them.
Enemy variety is surprisingly varied here as well. In addition to normal enemies that follow the borders of the puzzle area, there are enemies that fire bullets at you, ones that chase you and home in on you, ones that bounce around the screen, and even spiked chains that rotate around the screen, forcing you to avoid them as you try desperately to piece the puzzles together! Then there are the bosses. Crawlco has some of the most surprising bosses that I’ve seen in a while. They’re powerful and challenging and each one is completely different. Usually bosses in puzzle games are just faster puzzle segments but here they have complex attacks and multi-part patterns to contend with. If you’ve managed to complete puzzles with a perfect score, you get stars and you can use those stars to bypass bosses if need be, but it’s certainly not easy to get those stars, at least in normal gameplay! Fortunately, the devs realized how hard it would be to get a perfect score and there’s a handy on/off switch for enemies at the bottom of the main screen. It’s sad that this is an option as it implies a known balance issue, but even with enemies off some levels are tough to get a perfect score on!
Now, let’s talk about boobs. Crawlco Block Knockers (and yes, the title is a euphemism, no I’m not going to say it) is a challenging and intense puzzle game that lets you see breasts. Finish the third puzzle for each girl or beat a boss and you get to see here topless. Considering the art quality, that’s not all that exciting, but it’s a mildly entertaining novelty. As a nod to decency, there are three different “Modesty” modes, but the default setting is none. You can also choose to put stars over the women’s’ nipples or select hide mode which entirely hides the picture and replaces it with generic filled blocks. Honestly, this looks unfortunately terrible and you’re kind of stuck with the misogyny theme. Naturally, there’s a gallery that allows you to ogle to your heart’s content as well, prominently displayed on the bottom of the screen. Your character even does a crazy double take with hearts coming out of his eyes when he sees the naked girls at the end of a level, just like Jim Carrey in The Mask. It’s a bit much, but it’s obviously meant to be light-hearted fun. It’s a shame there isn’t some replacement art for the game. Toss in some clothed licensed characters to uncover as you play and you’d have a smash hit here because the game is fun as hell. But due to the adult nature of the game, most younger audiences should definitely not play this one and that’s a shame. I’d love to see this game re-titled and licensed to say, Capcom or Sega because it would be absolutely awesome.
Pixel graphics are back in vogue and Crawlco has them in spades. The entire graphic design looks very much like something you’d expect to see on the Sega Genesis, and the character designs aren’t particularly fancy. The bosses are fairly intricate but that’s all. Even the women you reveal aren’t particularly well-drawn, falling far below the standards you might expect even in a mid-range visual novel and defeating the purpose of seeing them topless. It’s reminiscent of playing Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance on the Commodore 64, a lot of work for very little payoff. Reskinning this game with Puyo Puyo Tetris style graphics would do wonders for its appeal. The soundtrack is quite solid however, kind of an 80s jazzy techo feel that fits well with the gameplay. You might not be rushing out to buy the soundtrack, but chances are good you’ll end up with a toe tapping here and there, especially if you’re playing in portable mode.
Crawlco Block Knockers might not be the most tasteful game out there and the Switch has more than its fair share of eroge titles, but beneath that tacky surface is an incredibly solid puzzle game that will challenge the hell out of you. Sure, visually it might belong in a smoky Japanese arcade next to an old Gals Panic, but the sheer quality of the gameplay makes Crawlco stand out amongst other indie offerings and at only $9, it’s a steal of a deal for that alone. Assuming you’re old enough to buy it and don’t mind seeing some women in questionable and even laughable poses, this is one title that’s absolutely not to be missed!
This review is based on a digital copy of Crawlco Block Knockers provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was excellent on both. Crawlco Block Knockers is also available on PC for Steam, along with its catchy soundtrack!