The Top Shelf: The Second Round 005: Kuri Kuri Mix

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Half an hour into Kuri Kuri Mix, known in the US by the slightly more loquacious title of The Adventures of Cookie & Cream, and I remembered why I kept bouncing off such a clever, cute and inventive co-operative puzzle game: it's designed for two players. That isn't to say you can't play it single-player, but the solo player is greatly tested by annoyances that a two-player team won't have to contend with quite as keenly.

The goal of Kuri Kuri Mix is to get both protagonists - pink and orange rabbits - to the goals at the end of a pair of linear 3D platforming stages. Both stages scroll vertically, and are narrow enough width-wise that they can sit side by side on the screen. This set-up lets either one player using the two analog sticks of one controller or two players with separate controllers (though I suppose they could always share one if you wanted to go that route) simultaneously control the two characters. This is vital, as many obstacles and pitfalls can only be neutralized by the other character. A lever, for instance, might raise platforms for the opposite character, letting them proceed to a button that in turns helps the first character. Some of these active elements get a little more surreal and unorthodox than simple switches and buttons: a music-themed world has characters blowing through trumpets or manipulating violin bows to get their companion safely ahead. Each level has a strict time limit that decreases whenever a character takes damage or falls down a pit: their health bars are effectively infinite, but the timer is not. Time can be replenished with silver (+30 seconds) and gold (+60 seconds) timepieces scattered across stages, but these are occasionally put in harm's way, giving the player quick risk vs. reward assessments to consider.

The chief issue with playing single-player comes down to an absolutely unnecessary and unwelcome addition: the time-stealer. The time-stealer is an enemy that will eventually appear after a period of inaction for either character. After about ten seconds of staying perfectly still, this enemy will fly over, latch onto the head of the inanimate teammate and expediate the countdown timer for what feels like a random duration. If playing two-player, this can be easily thwarted by moving a character around in circles if their path forward is currently blocked and requires their companion to step in: there's nothing else to do for that player, so it's a simple enough "treading water" process to keep in mind. With a single player, your attention is naturally fixed on one half of the screen if there's a challenging platform sequence or some sort of device to activate, and it's easy to either forget or be too concerned about moving the second character if your eyes are off them momentarily. This lets them be caught by the time-stealer more often, and it's the most irritating thing to deal with if you're trying to focus on one side of the screen. You can defeat the time-stealer before they latch on by jumping on their head - a common strategy for most enemies - but since they're usually flying overhead there's no real rhyme or reason to how you're able to get above them.

There's a handful of other issues too. While the sticks are responsive, it's not always easy to coordinate the two characters when they need to cooperate on a particular puzzle - this is particularly true of bosses, which usually require both characters be constantly active and involve special rules as a result. Interacting with objects in the environment, like the aforementioned levers, can require a vexing amount of precision before they work which is exacerbated by the insistent timer. The platforming's fine but not great, running into the issue many early PlayStation platformers do of having iffy borders to platforms where you slide off lips more often than not and the unreliable method of using shadows to figure out where you're about to land when those shadows are vague blobs and the land beneath isn't always conducive to making them show up (if the platforms themselves happen to be a darker color, for instance). The latter would be less of an issue if the game wasn't zoomed out by necessity, due to having two separate stages for the characters to traverse and fitting all that real estate plus a generous amount of the level to come into the window. There is a zoom-in button, but the downside to that is losing all sense of what's around you, including the next platform to jump to if there's a particularly big gap or enemies that might be milling around. I imagine this is something else that is less of a concern when you're in two-player and only have your side of the screen to focus on.

Kuri Kuri Mix may be the Dark Souls of co-operative puzzle games (which is a goof I get to make because From Software were the actual developers) but there's ways to mitigate the frustration and difficulty, chief of which is finding another person to play through it with. The PS2 isn't exactly packed with co-op games of a non-shooter bent, certainly not compared to what we have for Steam and consoles today, and I think Kuri Kuri Mix is a game to be honored for that reason and more. Given how rarely I play co-op games with people, however, it's perhaps not to be honored by this particular feature.

Result: Eliminated.

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