Puchi Puchi Virus

Joseph Luster April 4, 2008

Whenever a new puzzle game lands in my lap, I have visions of the future; one that entails dropping blocks into tight spaces, making them disappear and, if fortune is smiling bright upon me, tossing the remains over on my friend’s side as a means to his imminent doom.

Puchi Puchi Virus brings a different style of puzzler to the DS, giving the player a dual-screen doctorate in stylus virus disposal. With said stylus, you touch different colors of viruses in groups of three, creating a like-colored triangle that you can chain with other colors that fall within its parameters. If you don’t act on a set of viruses that you’ve already touched, or if you leave an active virus alone for a while, it will congeal and turn to stone. You can unfreeze them by linking viruses around their area, but the inevitability of the hardening lends a sense of urgency to the whole operation.

Stages generally give you three minutes to accomplish goals that can range from earning a certain number of points, completing various chains, or simply destroying a set amount of viruses on the playing field. After the first round of patients is cleared, business just keeps on booming. Next thing you know, you’re performing dazzling feats of derring-do in the virtual ER; touching viruses so fast you’d think the fires of Hell were crackling at your ankles.

Though the Tutorial mode explains all aspects of the game fairly thoroughly, it’s going to take a few rounds in action for everything to really click. When I first started playing, it all came to me easily, but I quickly hit a wall once the score requirements for each level skyrocketed. Instead of getting frustrated, though, I was encouraged to switch up my strategy, discovering in a matter of minutes that I had been going about it the wrong way since I first started my file.

Over the next couple of rounds, I found ways to increase my speed and combo level to the point where I was starting to play really fast, and the game was steadily becoming more and more of a blast. Going through each of the patients on the list is fun in and of itself, but the ability to battle against a friend without having to own two separate copies is the real icing on the cake.

Puchi Puchi Virus is one of the more unique puzzle games to surface on DS, and compliments its addictive design with cutesy art and a playful sense of humor. There are a ton of puzzlers to choose from nowadays for the on-the-go crowd, especially if you throw “brain training” into the fray, but PPV is a pretty safe bet for anyone with even a mild fever for the genre.

Publisher: NIS America
Developer: Jaleco
System: Nintendo DS
Available: 5/20/2008
Rating: E