Game EXP: Crumble (PC)

 

CRUMBLE
Systems: Linux, Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: December 4, 2020
Publisher: BRUTE FORCE
Developer: BRUTE FORCE
Time Spent: 11.5 Hours

I'm not really sure how to feel about Crumble.

I received the game free from a giveaway that Fanatical was doing a couple of months back and it seemed like a game I might get around to playing.  What I watched of the trailer looked interesting, although I was curious if my laptop would be able to play it well enough considering how fast the gameplay looked and how many moving pieces there were at any given time.  I only started playing Crumble when I did because The Squire saw the Steam icon of a blue ball face with its tongue sticking out and wanted to see the "silly face game."  I don't know how you would expect a three-year-old toddler not to ask to play any game with this as the icon really.  On top of all that, when you boot up the game, the same face as the icon becomes animated and starts wagging its tongue around in a way that will cause the same toddler to shake their head with their tongue out and giggle incessantly, then be momentarily annoyed when the face goes away and is instead replaced with a boring starting menu screen complete with a rocket ship.

Well, the "silly face game" has since become the "oops, we died again" game.

Crumble is a third-person (third-ball?) physics platformer speed running game where you jump and swing your way from the starting point to a waiting rocket ship that carries you to the next level.  Most of the stages have some level of dynamic element to them, be it cannons that fire projectiles at you that can damage the environment, or platforms that collapse because they are being perfectly balanced before your bally-self decided to jump on them.  The level design is often impressive and the sense of scale is breathtaking as you roll down a hill at blinding speed only to see the ground a thousand feet in front of you begin to crumble and you know that you're going to have to make that jump and then latch your tongue onto that tree branch.

When I first started Crumble, I wasn't sure that I was going to make it past the second stage (Stage 1B), where the tongue-sticking wall-jumping mechanic is lazily introduced and even on the Steam message boards, has caused a fair amount of frustration.  In this stage, you roll to a wall where the game prompts you to press the RT (right trigger which shoots out your tongue to the closest stackable surface) + A (the jump button).  This button combination, from my own experience, doesn't work the way that the developer thinks it should work in the mind of the player.  What this implies, I think anyway, is that with your tongue attached to the wall, you will jump higher than where your tongue is attached, and when you reattach your tongue, you will inevitably be in a higher position than when you started.  This early in the game, you are unable to fully rotate the camera to see a side view of what is happening, which is when you jump, your ball is actually jumping back, away from the wall, although you will gain a little bit of height, the button combination from the game is actually quite bad.  What I found worked in these situations was to swing like a pendulum against the wall, then jump at about a 45-degree angle then reattach and repeat, but that was only around stage 3D (the 8th stage overall) that I figured out this particular maneuver.

Like a lot of the criticisms about Crumble, they all seem to stem from the feeling that not a lot of consideration was made for people who had not already played this game for 5-10 hours when they first started the game and were not intent on speedrunning.  Some of this feeling is evidenced by the achievements on Steam with ever-decreasing percentages of players actually completing each of the five worlds.  I was telling Conklederp, and she agreed with me, that it says something about a game where just under 50% of the people who have started a game are either unable to or have no desire to get past the first world, being three stages.

• Fall Through the Fog for the First Time (Died): 71.8%
• Finish the First World: 52.6%
• Finish the Second World: 34.5%
• Finish the Third World: 25.3%
• Finish the Fourth World: 20.8%
• Finish the Fifth World: 17.4%
• Complete the Main Levels: 16.3%

I got just beyond this wall the first time I played with The Squire and I very nearly uninstalled the game.  The only reason why we picked the game back up the following morning, was because I had forgotten to uninstall it the previous evening.  So I continued and made it through 1B, and then 1C, and eventually the first world.  Each stage in each world would take me between 8 - 27 minutes, which is absurd when you look at some of the fastest times shown to you when you reach the end of the stage, which I feel is supposed to motivate you, but for me, it was almost the exact opposite.   Like, how am I supposed to feel when [PyNe] beat a stage in 07.905 seconds when it took me over 10 minutes?  Or on the last of the main levels, if it takes [PyNe] 2 minutes 41 seconds, it's going to take me what, 237 hours?*

The primary driving motivator behind me actually beating this game (okay, beating only the main levels) and enjoying it to some extent was The  Squire.  A couple of times a week, he would ask me to play the "Oops, we died game," and so we would play in the mornings while he ate his breakfast (usually while sitting on my lap) and would giggle incessantly whenever I died.  Because you cannot save your game or start over from a checkpoint mid-stage, I was forced to either get better at the game so I could actually finish more than one level when we played, or I would end up playing through the same stage multiple times to try and figure it out.  Because this is a game focused on speedrunning, the button layout can be rather treacherous with the B button dedicated to killing yourself and respawning at the previous checkpoint, but also when you pause the game, if you press the X button, it takes you back to the main menu.  There were multiple instances of accidentally taking myself back to the home menu screen while I was partway through a stage, effectively erasing my progress through that stage and having to start the stage over from the beginning.

Over the course of the game, there were a few more times I felt like I was going to stop playing altogether.  In 1C, the level at which you can fall, even when attached to anything, is significantly reduced to the point where it felt like the dev was butting into my game, and pressing the B button for me when I felt like I could have swung back up to my respective platform.  In 2E - First Flight, I could not figure out a jump from one flying rock dragon to another flying rock dragon, and this stage took me at least three separate attempts.  In 3C, one area that I thought required slow and precise jumping, took me over 18 minutes to get through (the whole stage took me 33 minutes).  And in the final world, I discovered that the game will kill you if the camera perspective ends up in the lava even when your ball is safe on a platform; combined with this I have experienced the game having the ball roll noticeably faster when the camera is closer to the ground as opposed to more of an overhead angle, but that could just be me.

My feelings about the game actually changed after I had finished the main levels and The Squire wanted me to play more (because I don't think he fully understands the concept of beating a game and playing a new one instead) so I decided to play through the beginning levels all over again.  It turned out that I had in fact gotten gud in my 11 hours of playing through all 21 of the main stages and while my first run-through of 1A took me 10:56.283, my subsequent playthroughs have brought me down to only 3:27.348 (still ranked in 10,000th place overall).  2A which first took me 8:17.661 now on a good run taking me only 2:29.006, and the second to last stage first took me 24:18.166 and can now take me as few as 6:34.209 (although my times here have gotten better than other stages because The Squire really likes the music in this stage).  What it boils down to is a combination of feeling more confident with my abilities in this game, the steadiness of moving the small squishy ball through stages that require minuscule movements, and my overall confidence in knowing how the game operates.

So now, it's actually pretty fun, although it can be a little frustrating to my ego when The Squire is telling me, "Get up!" when I'm dangling by my tongue from a ledge with a checkpoint in sight and I can't quite get the swing just right.  But that's the conundrum with Crumble.  I would not have beaten the main levels if The Squire hadn't wanted me to continue playing, and the only reason why I can now say I have fun is because I beat the game. I now have these particular and very specific sets of 3D speed platforming skills, but beating the game and getting to this point was definitely not an overly fun experience.

But you know, it is super satisfying when you're zooming down a track at speed and then swing and launch yourself into the stratosphere leaving most of the visible map behind if only for a moment.  I take pride in beating the main levels, and now I have gotten eight stars for beating the in-game time for each level which then opens up additional levels.  Yeah, Crumble is a real conundrum.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Sometimes I Feel I Should Just Go Home

*Absolutely zero shade towards [PyNe] and their speedrunning skills.  Upon seeing the leaderboard times, I did initially think that something was going on as far as cheating their way through the level, because how in the hell do you beat an entire level in only seven seconds!?  That's how.