Brainseed Factory’s PlayStation VR Puzzler Squishies Gets Physical This Spring

German indie developer Brainseed Factory launch virtual reality (VR) puzzle platformer Squishies for PlayStation VR a couple of months ago. Today, the team has announced a collaboration with Perp Games to bring the videogame to retail stores this Spring. 

Squishies

Squishies takes place in a joyful, vibrant world which Brainseed Factory has designed to be easily navigated using PlayStation Move controllers. The challenge is to help the squishie characters get home by manoeuvering them around a series of ever more complex and hazardous levels, pushing and pulling from one side of the maze to the other, all while earning medals, gathering crystals, climbing slopes, and avoiding pitfalls.

There are 100 levels across five worlds to complete in the main campaign mode, and when things get tough you can always use power-ups, alien technology and helpful creatures to get by. Once completed – or even before then – you can build your own levels using the same tools that Brainseed Factory used to build the videogame. Once completed the levels can then be shared with friends and the rest of the world using an online store.

Of the announcement, Bilal Chbib, Producer and Game Designer at Brainseed Factory said in a statement: “We have big plans for our little Squishies, and working with an experienced partner like Perp to bring the game to the beloved box is definitely a great step forward.”

Announcing the first Perp Games title in 2019, Rob Edwards, MD of Perp Games went on to add: “Squishies is a great puzzle game, that uses the Move controllers in a unique and intuitive way.   We really love the level editor and think fans will have great fun creating new levels to share to the community.”

Squishies will get a physical release in Spring 2019 for PlayStation VR owners in EU territories, with a North American date to be announced. Of course, you can buy Squishies digitally now, via the US PlayStation Store for $24.99 USD, or the EU PlayStation Store has the title discounted 20 percent, dropping the price from £19.99 GBP to £15.99. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Squishies, reporting back with any further future updates.

Squishies Review: A Cutesy Puzzler At Its Best When You Let Go

Squishies Review: A Cutesy Puzzler At Its Best When You Let Go

Don’t let Squishies’ plush exterior fool you; this is a challenging PSVR puzzler. The VR debut from Typoman developer Brainseed may not have the immediate ingenuity of the game the team made its name on, but there’s something here for VR fans in search of a challenge.

In Squishies, you use two Move controllers to guide rotund and utterly adorable little critters towards a goal zone, collecting optional crystals along the way. Levels are presented as dioramas that are a joy to explore, trying to find hidden items and secret passages within. Pulling the Move’s triggers will blow air, pushing a Squishy away from them, whilst the Move button will pull it back towards you. It’s a tricky mechanic that requires deep concentration and quick reactions to master, otherwise, you’ll send your pudgy little balls of goo careening off of cliff sides and straight into other perils.

Brainseed’s genius, though, is to allow the player to decide what kind of challenge they want from the game. Each of Squishes’ 100 levels ranks you based on how many of the optional crystals you collect, how many Squishies you get to the goal and how quickly you reach the finish. There’s no fail state and often plenty of checkpoints; you can take as many tries as you like to get to the finish without worrying about starting over, meaning planning and patience will be all you need to see through the entire game. That said, there are a fair amount of lengthy and demanding levels, which will sometimes leave you infuriated. It’s a balance Squishies doesn’t always get right.

Getting all crystals and beating time trials is, however, another story. Even Squishes’ earliest levels are frankly hellishly difficult if you aim for these goals. It’s great that the challenge is there for those that want it but I was more than satisfied aiming for level completion alone. Tight spots and difficulty spikes mean that’s trying enough as it is.

There are some unfortunate hiccups with the controls too. Brainseed has done a pretty good job getting the best out of the Move controllers, allowing you to pull yourself through the world and scale it both up and down with a few button presses, but the nature of Squishes’ reaction-based marble maze means that you’ll sometimes be putting the Move controllers in places that PSVR’s camera will disagree with. Add to that the fact that it’s easy to mix up pushing and pulling on the controller and you’ll have a lot of accidental deaths on your hands. It’s frustrating to have to wrestle with the controls on especially difficult spots, though it’s never game-breakingly bad.

Otherwise, there’s little reason to complain. With those 100 pre-made levels you’re already looking at hours of entertaining content with Squishies, and the campaign makes some welcome twists and turns by introducing new mechanics along the way. It is, quite simply, a very playable puzzler, and something that I was happy to kill time in. If you’re looking for anything deeper than that, this isn’t your game.

Outside of the campaign, there’s also an editor mode that lets you build your own levels and then share them online. You get the basic tools from the off but then more complex mechanics and items are introduced as you encounter them in the campaign. It’s a comprehensive system, though I’m not sure the core gameplay is compelling enough to build up anything other than a small but dedicated community around it.

Final Score: 7/10 – Good

Squishies may not be some profound realization of what puzzle games can be in VR, but it’s never anything less than entertaining even if that does often dip into frustration. Struggles with the controls aside, it’s a polished and thoughtfully-made experience with plenty of content and a charming world to explore. As far as ticking the boxes goes, it does so quite admirably.

Squishies is available now on PSVR. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.

Tagged with:

The post Squishies Review: A Cutesy Puzzler At Its Best When You Let Go appeared first on UploadVR.

Puzzle Platformer Squishies Available to Pre-order for PlayStation VR

Indie developer Brainseed Factory is well-known for its award-winning puzzler Typoman. Being the dark and morbid 2D platformer that it was the studio decided on a different direction for its next title, venturing into virtual reality (VR) to create Squishies. Alongside a new trailer Brainseed Factory has announced the launch of pre-orders, enabling gamers to save 20 percent off the regular price.

Squishies is a fun, colourful and carefree experience with the aim of the game being to help squishies get home by manoeuvering them around a series of ever more complex and hazardous levels. This is achieved by way of the PlayStation Move controllers which are represented in the videogame as transdimensional Alien Fish friends. These are then used to push and pull the squishies about.

There are 100 levels across five worlds to complete in the main campaign mode, and when things get tough you can always use power-ups, alien technology and helpful creatures to get by. Once those have been completed Squishies also includes a Creative Mode with a Level Editor for you to build your own levels and then share with friends – Brainseed Factory created all the campaign levels using the same editor.

“Squishies is a magical place, with colourful plant life, funny creatures and engaging puzzles,” says Art Director Arton Rexhëbogaj. “You can easily lose track of time.”

Squishies will launch on PlayStation Stores worldwide on 20th November. Via the US PlayStation Store, the videogame is $19.99 USD instead of $24.99 when you pre-order, while the EU PlayStation Store has the title listed for £19.99 GBP with PS Plus Members getting it for £15.99.

“It feels great to finally see the store page go live, though our Squishies journey is far from ended,” says Brainseed Factory Founder and Producer Bilal Chbib in a statement. “It’s the kind of game that starts as a small sprouting seed, then – with the help of a vibrant community and new content that we aim to release on a regular basis – will grow into a giant sequoia!”

For any further updates on Squishies, keep reading VRFocus.

Adorable VR Puzzler Squishies Returns As PSVR Exclusive

Adorable VR Puzzler Squishies Returns As PSVR Exclusive

Typoman developer Brainseed Factory is nearing the release of its first VR game, Squishies.

The studio recently reintroduced the game, which UploadVR helped reveal last year, as an exclusive for Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset. It’s set to release on 20th November, and it looks like it’s come a fair way since we last saw it.

via Gfycat

In Squishies, you push cutesy little critters (which, yes, are indeed squishy) around gauntlet-style levels in search of the goal. Using Move controllers to blow your friends across stages, you can gather bonus crystals that present a bit of extra challenge and dive head-first into diorama-like stages. The game also boasts a full level editor that enables you to share your creations with friends.

We were quite fond of what we played from the game’s early build. It’s not going to be a platform-defining game by any means, but there’s definitely fun to be had with Squishies.

Tagged with:

The post Adorable VR Puzzler Squishies Returns As PSVR Exclusive appeared first on UploadVR.

Squishies on The PlayStation VR Is More Pleasant Than You Might Think

Many children no doubt used to invent stories about their favourite toys and their whimsical adventures, inventing characters and personalities for dolls, action figures and plush toys. This is the sort of approach that developer Brainseed Factory are taking with its upcoming virtual reality (VR) platform title Squishies which is heading to the PlayStation VR.

Brainseed Factory previously worked on Typoman, a dark 2D platformer that contained some brutal and morbid themes. The developer has said on the PlayStation Blog that Squishies is an attempt to create something more positive and lighthearted.

The goal of Squishies is to help the titular critters find their way back home. The Squishies themselves are colourful blobs that vaguely resemble alien fish with stumpy little legs. They can be moved around by using the PlayStation Move controller to pull or push them into position.

In order to complete a level, the Squishies need to be moved to giant alien gates, which will giant them a route home. Power ups are available along with alien technology or alien creatures who are willing to lend a hand.

In order to give players that sense of creating their own story, Squishies comes with a level editor that lets players bring their imagination to life in order to craft colourful otherworldly environments and share them with other players.

Franziska Funken, Game Researcher at Brainseed Factory explains: “Aside from the extra adorable look of those creatures and the ingenious challenging gameplay, we wanted you to experience the huge fun we had while creating all these levels. That’s why we implemented the same tool that we used during development, so you can have the same experience that we had.”

Squishies is due for release on PlayStation VR on 20th November, 2018. A price point for the title has not yet been set. The announcement trailer is available to view below. Future coverage on
Squishies and other upcoming VR titles will be here on VRFocus.

Squishies Is An Adorable VR Puzzler From The Creators of Typoman

Squishies Is An Adorable VR Puzzler From The Creators of Typoman

When Brainseed Factory, the developers of Typoman, told me they were making a VR game, I’ll admit Squishies isn’t what I envisioned. The team’s previous game was a devilishly smart 2D platformer that played on words to create unique mechanics. Find a spare O lying around, for example, and you could role it up to an N to turn a machine on. It was an ingenious idea, and the strikingly morbid tone helped cement it in your mind.

Squishies, meanwhile, is anything but morbid. In fact it’s painfully adorable; you use two position tracked controllers (for the purposes of my early demo, the HTC Vive wands) to shoot gusts of wind that guide jelly-like spherical creatures around different courses, gathering crystals and avoiding perils. It’s a little like a marble maze, only if instead of tilting the board you moved the ball with two hairdryers, and instead of a hole that leads back to the finish, there’s a pit of lava.

“We’ve been VR early adopters from the very beginning,” Bilal Chbib, Brainseed CEO & Founder, tells me over the phone. “So we started with the DK1 as one of the first who ordered it and played around with it and participated in VR jams and visited events and things like that. We created our own tools and library.”

That was four years ago, though, so Brainseed has had a while to mull over ideas for a VR game. They wanted to create a game in which the gameplay was the main element, giving players the urge to come back and try new levels.

You can see the beginnings of those ideas in the early build of Squishies. The first few levels start out simple enough; you guide one of the critters across a broad path, using other buttons to either scale down so that you feel like a giant above the course, or scale up to bring yourself much closer to the action. You’re gently introduced to a handful of mechanics like basic switches and a power-up that lets you stick to walls, and you’re encouraged to spin the world around and explore for crystals you might have missed.

Things get a little more interesting deeper into the demo, however. In the third level, for example, you control two Squishies, each of which has separate goal zones. Starting out, I have to free one by guiding the other over to a switch, and then they navigate separate paths, taking it in turns to flick switches that open the way up for their companion.

Yet another level in I now have three creatures to take care of. This is where Brainseed introduce a little more challenge to the mix; a set of narrow pathways hold crystals that I want to grab, but flowers that can blow the Squishies off are lining the course. To grab them, I decide I need to be quick and accurate, taking time to carefully measure up the angle from which I’ll shoot my Squishy (which is a sentence I don’t feel comfortable writing), and then pushing it away. I fail drastically at the poor little guy falls to his doom.

I feel like that’s where Squishies will succeed the most; not as a gentle puzzler but a deceptively tricky one, a little like the Super Monkey Ball of VR, if you will. This level is also massive with plenty to explore, and finding all of the crystals in itself is a game, let alone getting your little friends to grab them.

Crucially, Brainseed has a lot of ideas for where it wants to take Squishies’ gameplay over the course of development. During the interview Chbib discusses ideas for new power-ups, level designs and perhaps even multiplayer. One of the game’s main selling points is already included in my demo, though: a level editor.

Squishies’ levels are made up of blocks, a little like Minecraft only not as blatant. I didn’t realize that each level could have been simply pieced together using these terrain cubes until I dived into the level editor myself to tinker around. It’s wonderfully simple; I can select which block I need from a menu then basically paint it into the world in front of me. I can choose different threats and power ups, change the gradient to add some verticality, and decided how many Squishies should be in the level.

The level editor was an important part of this experience for Chbib and the team, though they’ve got their reservations. “We noticed that creating these levels is much more fun than playing these levels,” he admits. So the team capitalized on that; it’s adding features to help foster a community that will hopefully one day embrace this side of the game.

Of course, Brainseed wants playing the game to be just as fun as making it. “We’re trying to figure out how to keep the player engaged in the gameplay,” Chbib says. “We have a feeling that creating levels is much more fun but there’s this danger of having people create levels that no one wants to play.”

He talks about giving players motivation to see levels through with hidden secrets and rewards that will unlock the game’s exploration side.

Given the quality of Brainseed’s last game, though, I’m confident the team will work out something. A taste of Squishies (another uncomfortable phrase) promised a charming, inventive puzzler with just a hint of addictive challenge. The team hopes to have the game out in around a year’s time, so there’s a lot they can do to build on that.

For more info make sure to check out the game’s official website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Tagged with: