A game I first played as part of the Evercade Game of the Month is Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em, and it’s a puzzle game from Second Dimension Games and YouTuber The Immortal John Hancock. In the game you play as a cartoon version of John and toss multi coloured bricks upwards to destroy other bricks that are the same colour.
The game gives me a slight vibe of Wario’s Woods, mostly because it’s a puzzle game where you directly control the character who is manipulating the coloured blocks you are trying to eliminate. I think I’ve played a few games that have that idea, but certainly in the case of this game, Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em, it just feels like you could have used a curser to move the blocks.
The game doesn’t put a time limit on you to figure out the puzzles, so there’s no time crunch to solve things before a well fills up as you’ll have seen on several of the puzzle games I’ve recently featured on the Puzzle Game Power Hour series on this channel.
What there is instead is that you only have a certain number of moves you can make to complete each puzzle. It’s a short game, although very quickly you’ll learn that you have to figure out the precise order to tackle a level in or you’ll run out of moves.
The game was easy enough to beat, with it only taking me just over half an hour whilst watching a TV show at the same time, but by the end of it I still felt that some of the puzzles was just solved by good fortune rather than me having actually solved them all. This is a game that can be beaten by trial and error as much as it can be beaten by skill.
One of things that makes this unique to many puzzle games where you match colours is that the well of blocks is at the top like in Puzzle Bobble/Bust a Move. I suppose this game would have to play like that so that you could have a character running about on foot at the bottom.
The game is super short, and actually feels kinda unfinished. There is a title screen, but no options, and only one mode which is about 25 levels long. I feel like they should have added some sort of story or purpose to the game since you are controlling a character.
When you go to start you get a screen that explains how it works, but as much as I don’t like tutorials in games, I think they should have had one as you go through the first couple of levels to make it clear how the mechanics of the game work.
I also found that the game seemed to either glitch or go wrong a few times which was a bit disappointing. To complete a level, the idea isn’t that you get rid of every block in a stage, but that you leave around three or four, and this is just a bit odd. I think it’s that you have to leave one of each colour, because for some reason, you sometimes throw a block at a colour and they don’t swap. I think it’ll only swap the colour you’re holding if there are at least two there…to be honest, I’ve just finished the game, and the fact that I’m not completely sure shows that it’s not super clear, but that it also doesn’t need to be.
If you do wipe out a colour the block you hold is now free to throw at any colour, but again it would seem it can only pick up a new colour if you throw it at stacks of two…but I’m not sure why.
I did find a couple of instances where the blocks would just infinitely scroll across the screen as if they were perpetually stuck. I’m not sure if this was that the game was broken or that I had caused a condition where a level became unwinnable. You will find levels are unwinnable often, not just because you don’t have enough moves, but because there are no moves you’re able to make with the colour in your hand unable to reach any that match.
I think when this happens the game should come up with a screen to tell you this is why you’ve failed. In these instances you can either toss the block until you get the game over screen for the level, or you can reset a level at any point by pressing the start and B button together. I think this was designed for Mega Drive so on screen it says to press start and C, and obviously on Evercade there is no C button. I think a pause menu and an option to restart would have been better than having to press a button combo that if you hadn’t seen the instruction of when you first started, you would have completely been stuck without.
When I did find there was this glitch of the block infinitely swiping the screen, I restarted the level to find that the first time I tossed the block it would instantly start swiping again. I’d suggest maybe using the save state feature on each level in case this happens and hopefully you’ll get past it.
As a free game of the month game, this was a short, and ok game, but I think it needs a little more cooking to become a classic puzzler. The graphics are simple, but effective, and the game is an easy to play game, even if it does need a bit more ironing and polishing. It’ll be an inoffensive addition to what will become the Indie Heroes Collection number 4 next year.
What would you rate this game?
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