Crush Hands-On First Look

Crush is a new puzzle game from Sega and Kuju Entertainment's Brighton studio that is more easily absorbed visually than verbally. So for once, we'll recommend you stop reading for a minute and just watch that video there to your right. It's not an easy game to wrap your head around from description alone, but we'll try our best. Crush puts you in the role of Danny, an insomniac with some seriously twisted repressed memories. Danny enlists the aid of a therapist who apparently moonlights as a mad scientist, since the crackpot has created the "crush" machine, a device that can turn Danny's memories into abstract 3D levels of varying shapes and sizes.

Of course, your job is to navigate Danny through the game's 50 levels to help him get through all this pent-up angst, and this is where the unique crush mechanic comes in. Each level is constructed in full 3D, with platforms of different sizes and heights, as well as some that are separated by large gaps. You can rotate the camera 90 degrees in any direction and also move it to a directly overhead view. When you hit the crush button, the 3D level literally compresses into 2D toward the camera, depending on what angle you're looking at it from.

This renders depth irrelevant, so platforms that were far apart suddenly become close together. If you're using the overhead view when you crush, surfaces of different heights are suddenly on the same plane. You'll frequently switch between 2D and 3D in a given level to let you access new areas, though the solution to any one obstacle probably won't ever be obvious. (We used a lot of trial and error just to get through a couple of very early, easier levels.) Like we said, it's a heady concept, and it forced us to think in ways we hadn't considered when we first got our hands on the game, and we think that's a pretty good sign for a puzzle game.

Each level contains a specific number of blue orbs, and you'll have to collect at least half of them to open the exit and move on to the next level. Then you'll have to reach that exit, which can be quite a task in itself. There are some other things to collect, based on the early levels we played; we noted a number of green puzzle pieces and a trophy that you can only pick up while looking at the level from a specific angle. These collectibles will allow for some kind of unlockable content, though Sega isn't saying what that is yet.

One last element of the gameplay we saw during our demo was the addition of nightmares, which are actually giant cockroaches that infest some levels. (Apparently, Danny is especially afraid of cockroaches, but then, who actually likes them?) You have to either avoid the nightmares or find a way to squish them, in a lot of cases. In one of the demo levels we saw, the player had to move a giant rolling ball down to a platform just above a nightmare, then crush to 2D so the ball could be rolled off the platform and onto the roach, smashing it. These giant balls will also come in handy as mobile platforms for reaching higher platforms, in some cases.

With dozens of levels included and a difficulty curve that's said to ramp devilishly upward as the game progresses, it seems like Crush could offer a lot of lasting value. Sega's talking about 20 or so hours of gameplay, with the later levels taking 30 minutes to an hour on their own. We're curious to see how complex it gets later on, and we'll find out when the game pops onto PSPs this summer.