Super Crane Bug

I'm guessing Super Crane Bug was designed as a block puzzle game with the "you may not want to but you must" weapon switching gimmick from seminal indie classic Super Crate Box. Crane Bug also seems to run native in the Pico-8 fantasy console, which imposes tight limitations on color palette, asset quantity, and even the amount of words in the code. With that said, Super Crane Bug comes pretty close to transcending its humble medium: although it eschews a larger campaign mode or any Steam Achievements, it does save your high scores in three separate game modes and includes an alternate visual style. A few notes: - The crane tool seems a little less useful than the others the later into the game you are. Because it can't lift more than four blocks at a time, it's mostly only able to arrange blocks one by one near the top of the stack. only a few cycles in, it's very easy to get this item when you're clogged up with junk blocks and not have any good options, and I've easily died more on this tool than any of the others. Arguably you can use the more powerful tools that come before it to help set up, so it's not damning, but it's an obvious bottleneck in the otherwise hectic flow of the game. -the pause menu is a standard Pico-8 pause menu that, unlike most block puzzle games, doesn't hide the entire field of play. It's clunky, but this can be used as a breather to plan some of your moves out. Probably not intended. -A few times I lost without really knowing why. It clears the screen pretty quickly after a fail state, so keeping the screen up to show where the problem was would make the losses feel more fair. Overall this is a fun bite-sized action puzzler, and possibly one of the most feature complete Pico-8 games I've played. No regrets paying the asking price for it, and I'm sure I'll come back to it on many a lunch break.