Pullblox (Nintendo 3DS) Review

The basic premise of Pullblox is simple enough. Mallo, the red main character, goes to Pullblox Park, where kids of his kind play on big puzzles called Pullblox. Kids can climb on those by pulling and pushing the blocks they are made of. However, Pullblox Park is a dangerous place, and children get stuck inside those puzzles, ending up being flattened inside of them. Therefore, the kind elderly creator of these Pullblox asks Mallo to use his wits to solve all the puzzles by freeing the children stuck in each one of them, which will be easier said than done.

A Pullbox, before any action was performed on it, can be compared to a flat image composed of different shaped and coloured blocks, which Mallo can subsequently pull towards the foreground, and push back towards the background, with the camera facing the scene. The goal is to pull them to turn these blocks into platforms on which Mallo can then hop to climb up the Pullblox, reaching that place up high where the child was stuck. Basically, there is one block inside the Pullblox, marked with a child icon that represents the goal of each of those puzzles that has to be reached.

In order to free a child from the Pullblox, Mallo must reach that specific spot, and make sure that the specific block is pulled forward, revealing the trapped person in question, and Mallo must grab it to complete the stage. The basic concept seems easy enough from the outset, but the more the player goes on in the game, the harder it is to solve these puzzles. Soon enough, Pullbloxes involve opening inside the blocks revealing ladders that can take players to a different part of the Pullblox, provided that both ends of the passage are opened, which means that both ends must be visible on top of a pulled block. And if that wasn't enough, later still switches make their appearance, which allow for the pulling of all the blocks in the Pullblox that bear the same colour as said switch. By then things have started to become quite brain teasing, and that is the core of the Pullblox experience.

In terms of gameplay, blocks may be pulled by three increments at the maximum, and pushed back into position as many times as the player sees fit. This can be done by grabbing them either by the front or from the sides, with the B button. Mallo jumps at a press of the A button. A 2D map is displayed at all times on the bottom screen and can be zoomed in by pressing the X button, which is very handy for figuring out a way on very large Pullbloxes.

Alternatively the action can be frozen and zoomed into directly on the 3D screen and the camera can be moved around with the Circle Pad. Options for thoroughly planning the path ahead certainly aren't lacking. Last, but not least, players can also rewind all of the action that took place in the last 20 or so seconds. This allows for recovery from some unfortunate falls or mistakes without having to step on the reinitialising button at the bottom of the Pullbox, which resets the puzzles to its initial state so as to start from scratch.

The gameplay, though quite simple to grasp, allows for an excellent grip on things, leaving all the necessary room for the intellect to work out the solution to the puzzle, which is absolutely excellent. The tutorial levels spread along the road are also excellently presented, making the learning process of the few ins and outs of Pullblox even more simple. The game holds about 200 puzzles to solve, and the difficulty increases slowly until the end of the game, further ensuring that players progressively learn every possible tip and trick along the way. By the end of the game, it has become very challenging, with some puzzles lasting dozens of minutes. Thankfully, it is possible to skip the current Pullblox after spending quite a while on it.

Another prominent aspect of the game is the Pullblox Studio, where the player can create personalised puzzles. At first, few options are accessible, but as progress is made through Pullblox Park, more options become available, allowing for the making of puzzles as intricate and complicated as those found in the main game, if not even more so. Once a puzzle is created, if the player is capable of clearing its own brainchild, it is then flagged as good to be shared via a QR code. Indeed, it's impossible to export a Pullblox to a QR code unless it has been cleared at least once, ensuring that creations shared online are always possible to beat. It's just a shame that these can't be uploaded to a dedicated online sharing system though, requiring that the player instead to remove the SD card from the handheld and use it with a PC to get them hosted online, on a website of choice. As players will soon find out, most Pullbloxes found online are almost pixel perfect recreations of 8- and 16-bit video game characters, which is highly enticing for fans of old-school games since some can be quite visually stunning.

Speaking of visuals, the whole of Pullblox isn't especially detailed, but this is actually for the better, because too much detail would probably make the whole puzzle harder to read...and solve. That's not to say that the whole thing lacks charm, though.