Games that combine two things are often ridiculously awesome. An open world Zelda title? Fantastic! A multiplayer FPS with PvE and PvP elements? It was pretty awesome for a while! A multiplayer Fallout? We’ll see! But one combination I never expected was the classic game of snake combined with puzzle elements. That’s exactly what you get with Grab the Bottle, the story of a man going through life with a love of the bottle. Baby bottles, soda bottles, you name it, this dude will do whatever it takes to get it with his Stretch Armstrong arm.
The game starts out simple enough – you’re a hungry baby that wants milk, and your neglectful parents left your bottle FAR away. Using your limitlessly stretchy arm you’ll have to avoid obstacles to get your hand over to it, grab it and bring it back. As the levels go on you’ll find things quickly become challenging as you’re not only dodging obstacles but collecting items along the way, pulling doors open, grabbing and dropping items to clear paths and doing it all without letting your frail hand bump into anything (your own arm included!). Bumping into obstacles 3 times will cause you to retract your hand in pain and start all over again, and when things get complex there’s no doubt you’ll be doing plenty of that!
This may sound a bit complex, but the controls make it very simple. Just like snake, forward momentum is automatic and all you have to worry about is turning. Grab the Bottle also adds a grab mechanic using the trigger; grabbing the bottle automatically ends the level and grabbing doors yanks your hand back along with the door. The real puzzle element is grabbing objects: grabbing an object will make your hand retract toward the beginning until you let go of it, so if you want to drop scissors on a rope to cut it you’ll have to go past the rope first! This is used both to get past obstacles and to get out of dead ends!
I snagged this game to review under the assumption it would be some silly, quick little Switch game, so I was rather amazed that these puzzles are both solid and incredibly challenging! Sure things start off easy, but that’s how Grab the Bottle grabs YOU. Many levels are bigger than the screen and allow you to scroll around and plan for as long as you like, but even so you should expect to take at least a few practice runs to figure out how things will work. You’ll need to make perfect use every pickup and grabbable object if you want to grab that bottle!
For a game that was likely born from snake as a kid’s arm, there’s a LOT of variety here. I was amazed that not only was I never bored with the challenges presented, I really ended up putting a lot of thought and planning into each level. As I went further into the game things got a little too precise for me, and I ended up failing repeatedly because I’d accidentally bump something in tight spaces. Luckily, after failing repeatedly the game allows you to “cheat” in that particular level by turning on either invincibility (which puts a glove over your hand) or the ability to see the order of items you should collect/grab/shove/etc. Invincibility still makes your hand recoil when you bump things, but it allows you to bump things infinitely without failing.
All in all, if you enjoy precise puzzle games, Grab the Bottle is a surprisingly great choice, especially since it’s $5 or less! I will add, however, that I personally got stuck on a level and have nooooooo idea how to get past it. Even with invincibility and the interaction order I simply wasn’t able to make a fulcrum knock a cage off of a collectible, and you can’t complete a level without getting all of the collectibles. I tried a dozen times and it would lift the cage just enough for the cage to slide off the fulcrum and be sealed forever. Worse yet, those dozen attempts took 25+ overall since the level required lots of precision and the frustration would make me mess up and forget steps and I’d fail before I even arrived at that point.
Grab the Bottle is available for Switch (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One, iOS, Google Play and Steam (Windows, Mac and Linux)
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.