Chuchel Is A Bizarrely Beautiful, One-Of-A-Kind Puzzle Game Free This Week
You don’t need to understand it to enjoy it.
The Epic Games Store has offered plenty of free games since it started giving away new titles every week. They’ve ranged from popular releases to lesser-known indie games, and this week, one of the flat-out strangest games the storefront has ever offered is up for grabs. Excellent animations and playful puzzles make the kid-friendly freebie one-of-a-kind, and you have until May 1 to claim it.
You’ll probably know within about five seconds if Chuchel is for you. Developed by Amanita Games, creator of Machinarium and Pilgrims (which just announced a board game version coming this year), Chuchel is an absurd puzzle game and an overload of surreal sights and sounds. When it comes to gameplay, Chuchel is lightweight enough to almost be called a puzzle toy rather than a game. In each one-screen puzzle, Chuchel, a little orange ball of fluff wearing an acorn for a hat, wants to get a cherry that’s hidden somewhere nearby. Unfortunately, so does a creepy little pink bug and a gigantic hand that occasionally appears from nowhere to snatch it away.
If you don’t crack a smile during this trailer, Chuchel probably isn’t for you.
To help Chuchel get the cherry, you basically just need to click on whatever’s arranged around the screen in the right order. In one scene, you pick up a giant spoon and repeatedly swing it into an egg to crack it. In another, you set up a series of bizarre creatures to launch Chuchel off a living see-saw into a portal. In still another, you need to convince a floating alien amoeba to let Chuchel past to grab the waiting cherry. Some of the tougher puzzles take a while to work out, but it’s more about trying everything onscreen to see what it does than using any sort of real-world logic to figure out what’s going on. If you get stuck, you can always pull up a handy guide to explain what order you need to interact with all the nonsense you’re looking at.
Chuchel isn’t going for the thrill of solving difficult puzzles like in Blue Prince, or even in gentler but more traditional games like Monument Valley. Instead, it leans on the simple fun of interacting with everything in Chuchel’s bizarre world and seeing the unexpected results. Chuchel is endlessly surprising, with psychedelic flying sequences and homages to Space Invaders and Tetris popping up one moment before being replaced with something even more the next. It wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining without the game’s absolute commitment to the bit. Chuchel is relentless in its wackiness, constantly pushing the boundaries of how strange it can get and what twisted logic it can wring out of absurd puzzles. The fact that it’s all so gorgeously animated makes it a treat just to watch at the same time.
Chuchel’s puzzles are borderline impossible to explain without playing them first.
That’s also what makes Chuchel a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game. At times, it’s an assault on the senses, with grotesque visuals and the constant din of its screens full of chittering monsters blasting out of your speakers. Its sheer over-the-top cartoonishness is what could make it a good fit for kids to play, with or without an adult to help them through, but if you’re just not in the mood for its shenanigans, it’s not going to win you over.
If you’re on board, though, Chuchel is an endless delight. Well, endless for the roughly two hours it takes to finish anyway. More than any other puzzle game, Chuchel reminds me of the bizarre games and animations you’d find scattered around the internet before social media radically changed what being online means. The idiosyncrasy of Chuchel makes it truly feel like no other modern game, and that unique identity means it can scratch an itch that no other game is trying to reach.
