Lost in Cheese

I received a free copy of this game for the Queen's of Cosy curation page and I'm really glad as this was really fun. The story is pretty non-existent basically you are a cat rolling along pushing blocks of cheese out of the way to clear levels, it's a puzzler which progressively gets harder. The visuals were really pretty, I was especially impressed by the moving water and wind effects. The music quite chill with pleasant sound effects. The game would have benefitted from a tutorial, it took me a while to realise controls were on the menu. The customisation was cute and there some funny tongue-in-cheek dialogues. No ending made it feel a little abrupt and the difficulty down the line prevented me from going for a perfect game with all achievements. On the whole though a well-made addictive indie puzzler that I really enjoyed.

What’s going on in the game doesn’t matter all that much. Even though it revolves around some kind of cheese invasion, the real focus is on the puzzles. You play as a cube shaped cat, just like every other character you meet in the main hub. It’s a simple but charming setup, and I liked that the game gives you an actual hub area to walk around in instead of just throwing you onto a plain menu screen where you click stages. You can talk to the characters you meet there, although none of them are particularly important and they can mostly be ignored. The progression is linear because you can’t freely choose any stage you want. Instead, you need to earn cat tokens to unlock new stages along the path. The required number of tokens is always visible, but earning them is not nearly as easy as it sounds. The puzzle mechanics revolve around cheese cubes that must be pushed out of the way or into holes to create a path to the exit. Cubes can only be pushed, and since most stages contain several of them, it’s very easy to trap yourself in an unsolvable situation if you make the wrong move. There’s also no undo feature, which means restarting the entire puzzle is your only option. That can be frustrating. Simply reaching the exit usually isn’t enough if you want to fully complete a stage. Each puzzle has three move limits, and finishing within the first limit rewards you with all three tokens at once. Later stages don’t expect perfection everywhere, but you’ll probably end up replaying some earlier puzzles to shave off a few moves and earn extra tokens. Stages also contain collectible coins. Thankfully, coins are permanently registered as soon as you collect them, so you don’t have to gather every coin and beat the move requirement in the same run. I honestly appreciated this decision because some coins are hidden beneath cheese blocks, forcing you to waste moves that would otherwise make a perfect score impossible. For the tougher stages, it’s usually smarter to focus on earning all the tokens first, then replay the level later just to collect the coins without worrying about move limits. Each stage consists of several standard puzzles, one simpler puzzle focused mainly on collecting coins, and two more challenging puzzles where you can only finish by reaching the exit face first. Since the cat itself is a cube, this creates some clever movement challenges that require a bit more planning if you want to stay within the move limits. Besides introducing new environments and visual themes, each stage also adds a unique mechanic. For example, the second stage introduces air platforms that launch you upward, while the third adds movable blocks. Most of these mechanics involve activating switches to trigger certain actions, but since you can’t reset or undo anything, you often need to carefully prepare your moves before committing to them.