Pushcat is what you get when you cross Bejeweled with Boulder Dash. Interestingly, the game specifically draws inspiration from the NES version of Boulder Dash, which I have something of an irrational love for after I spent most of my childhood playing it.
The mechanics are very simple: you need to collect a quota of silver coins from each level, but first you need to create the coins by pushing and dropping colored gems into rows of three. Later, there are some other ways that coins are created, as well as some other mechanics like blobs that eat rocks and bombs that destroy walls under certain circumstances. If you collect the coin quota and exit, you can progress to other levels, but you can also aim for a “star” quota on most levels by collecting even more coins. There are about fifty levels in all.
The game has many random elements. Some levels are completely random, others are generated based on a fixed template, but the specific contents of the level will change every time it's reloaded. Naturally, the random elements will occasionally screw you over, but for the most part it works as an interesting challenge feature.
But here’s the problem: about halfway through the game, there's a fearsome difficulty spike, and it basically becomes a masochism game. Ghosts will chase you, bombs will blow you up, puzzles will become super strict, and gem quotas will be so steep that you'll need to really stretch your brain about how you tackle a level and where you push things. Levels can get really long and it may take up to ten minutes just to set up a level correctly to produce the gems you need, especially for star quotas. There is no rewinding, and so dropping one gem in the wrong place could mean you need to start the whole level over again. You might also get caught by a ghost, blown up by a bomb, or trapped between rocks and need to restart. The final boss level can only be described as torture. On a positive note, there are no time limits to be seen, except when the level design creates them.
There’s also no leaderboards, extra levels, level editor, or anything else to encourage replay once you’ve collected all of the stars. At the end of the journey, game certainly feels like it's missing something.
Although I personally enjoyed this game, I can't recommend it to the majority of puzzle gamers. It's not an easy 100% for achievement hunters, and it's probably going to be a bit too far on the frustrating side for most people. If you really love Boulder Dash-type games and you’re okay with a challenge, you might like it as much as I did. Otherwise, there isn’t a lot to appeal to the average player or ease them into the genre, and you might wind up finding a bit too much to hate about it instead.
