Crayon Physics Deluxe

Emily Balistrieri February 16, 2009

Yep, childhood. Family restaurant placemats with an abundance of paper spaces and stubby crayons dozens of grubby hands have ground down . Does it come with fries? Yes, but we’re sharing them. And we wait. Thankfully eternity is broken by the cheer of doodling random smiley faces and yes, castles; I drew castles, rockets, funny monsters. Petri Purho has nailed the paper placemat landscape and then brought it to life.

Highly anticipated after winning the grand prize at last year’s Independent Game Festival, Crayon Physics Deluxe is a puzzle game where anything you sketch becomes an object in the sim, with gravity in full effect. Thus, circles roll, squares stack, and expletives twirled out in cursive clunk to the ground (if there is any) and taunt your frustration. The object is to maneuver the little red ball over to the little yellow star. The problem is that sometimes this little red ball starts out falling into an abyss, sometimes there is a giant blocking your path, sometimes you’ll need to construct some simple machines. Of course, no one is stopping you from constructing an obscenely complicated one (or an obscene one, for that matter-sigh), and in fact you can award yourself for outlandish solutions in each puzzle because there are three types of star-worthy solutions: elegant, old school (each fraught with limitations such as no nudging the ball with a click or only being allowed to draw one object), and awesome-the category you can nominate yourself in by tagging the entry in the solution tab. Flags mark your progress towards completing each puzzle in all three ways, and as you collect more and more stars you’ll unlock new islands on the world placemat.

I did have an awful lot of fun drawing silly nonsense on the overworld, but as for levels, the rocket ones were probably most awesome. I like drawing ramps and dropping things, attaching hammers to pins and playing hands-free croquet, creating a jungle of ropes and weights in an effort to get just the right amount of tug, but for sheer glee, attaching anything to a rocket and watching it motor around the screen is best. For me, the trick was often to find the right moment to unhinge the ball from its rocket or weight to send it flying through a useful arc instead of getting dragged offscreen.

There are many puzzles where it’s possible to cheat your way through by exploiting the way that overlapping objects act-you can sometimes just keep drawing items in the same space until they push each other (and the ball) over an obstacle. Of course, this doesn’t earn you a flag or an extra star (and you will need more than the minimum to reach the final island), so the game is designed cleverly to encourage “correct”behavior. On one hand, it would be nice if it alerted you as to the type of your success upon completion of a stage, instead of making you go click it on the map to view your stats, but I can definitely see how keeping you playing instead of slogging through information every time is slicker.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is not only cute and chock-full of levels, but it comes with the tools to extend both cuteness and levels through your own clever design. For many, this will be where the fun really starts, because who doesn’t want to send the ball flying over that swirly-eyed, horn-sporting, rainbow-coated beast of legend you used to draw when you were eight? This is a great two-heads-are-better type of game, and $19.95 is well worth the laughter, fist-shaking, and Friday fish fry flashbacks.