Lup★Salad
Last year, ATLUS USA launched Catherine on the Playstation 3 and XBox360. The game involved a group of people who every night were dragged into a puzzle horror world where they must navigate a block tower to survive. While Catherine portrayed a world where adults were hounded by an endless tower of blocks, in another gaming universe and in the eyes of a five year old child, block puzzles play an integral part of her fantasy world…. and still prove a worthy challenge.
Lup★Salad comes with a storyline however remains untouched and untranslated. To give you a gist of the storyline it follows a young girl by the name of Salad, who through her imagination recreates a number of different environments and roles for her to play – from being a penguin to a nurse to a robot. You are treated to two segments of storyline – one at the beginning of each world and one at the end of each world, with puzzle based gameplay in between.
Each of the themed areas are made up of several levels, and to progress to the next area you are required to complete all of them. The levels each consist of several set environment pieces and coloured blocks, with your goal being to have all the blocks of the same colour touch other (Either vertically or horizontally) until none of the coloured blocks remain. You do this by pushing, jumping and avoiding knocking any other block into the incorrect position.
While the idea itself isn’t too complex, it can get quite complicated even in the earlier levels and especially where they go from simple movement puzzles to including blocks on multiple platforms and several different block types that slowly unlock as the game progresses. Given the limited movement capabilities of Salad, it is possible for example that you will need to avoid merging certain blocks together, choosing an option which may initially seem incorrect or reset the stage several times before you can solve it. Sure it can sometimes lead you to frustration, but it is fun. In addition to the main story mode, you can use the Salad character designs to take part in a couple of other single and multiplayer modes
Both the visuals and soundtrack of Lup★Salad contribute to a childlike and cutesy aesthetic, as if the world came out of the imagination of a young child. Each of the games main areas are based on a different theme with character designs for Salad to match. The game also throws in a few pieces of artwork during storyline scenes (See left) which also tries to be cute whilst hiding the fact on the next screen is a number of even harder puzzles. The stage designs themselves are creative and consist of the same background artwork for each area.
Each of the worlds come with two tracks – a lyrical song which is set by default (Involving who I assume may be the Voice actress of Salad) on loop and a lyricless one of a different tune. For the most part while I could tolerate the lyrical songs for the first few levels, but then I chose to stick with the lyricless ones (Also the fact that as with the visual designs, you get the feeling the cutesy songs are taunting you).
Overall, Lup★Salad is a simple but complex game that I am quite glad to see as part of GungHo Online Entertainment America’s six releases. I initially went in expecting a simple puzzle game but ended up dedicating quite a few hours towards it and getting stumped on more than a handful of levels.
Overall Score: B+
For the original post this came from, view “GungHo Online Entertainment America – Japanese PS1 Classics Review Part 1“
