Game

Continuing my random early Gameboy exploration, we got KWIRK! Kwirk is a rather classic gameboy game, though I don’t think it ever really hit that eschalon of anything above cult classic. But when I played this, I did have lots of people in chat go “oh man I played this a lot in the car back in the day”.

Game

Also known as Puzzle Boy, this is the second game I’ve played in this series. The first was on PCEngine, and it blew. It was a buggy broken mess and was missing a lot of cool mechanics. This is so much better, it’s not even funny. In the Puzzle Boy franchise, you play as a lot of different veggies and fruits. In this one, you’re a little tomato boy who doesn’t appear in any of the other games.

Game

The goal is extremely simple. In normal mode, you’re dropped into a screen with an exit. Get to that exit. Between you and that exit are blocks and spinners. The spinners take a bit of getting used to how they work, it’s a bit hard to spatially grasp them, but those are really the only two mechanics. You’ve got blocks, which you can move around and push into holes to fill them, and spinners, which can be blocked depending on the shape of the spinner and whats around it.

Game

There’s also a challenge mode, where it gives you a number of rooms and you have to go through them as fast as you can. You decide the number of rooms before it starts, and you get points on how fast you clear each room. There’s only so many rooms the game has in store for each difficulty, of course, but it likes to do mirrored rooms to keep things fresh, and you’d be surprised how much that works to remove the previous room from your brain.

Kwirk is a very simple puzzle game, but one that stands tall. If you were in 1989 and had a gameboy, you could do so much worse than this. Kwirky little puzzle games on the Gameboy you can pick up and do a few puzzles in were the bread and butter for this system, and this is really one of the greats. At least, until we get to the sequel~