If you’re on Steam or Xbox Live anytime soon, you really should think about buying Blocks That Matter, Swing Swing Submarine’s feisty blend of Tetris, Minecraft and Boulder Dash. It’s an elegant, wonderfully infuriating platform-puzzler in which you chew through chunks of wood, sand, metal, crystal and stone and then spit them out again in sets of four in order to navigate devious mazes. It’s cute and clever, and if that wasn’t enough, it’s also an interactive reading list of the developers’ favourite block games, with collectable nods to everything from Portal’s Companion Cube to the cardboard terrors of Gregory Horror Show.
It builds, to a certain extent, upon the outfit’s previous Flash game – the loading bar at the beginning suggests it may have been built with Flixel, in fact – called Tuper Tario Tros. Once again, Tetris forms part of the basic framework – this time, as the name deftly suggests, in combination with Super Mario Bros. – but in the earlier offering, the references are far more explicit.
Tuper Tario Tros. is, in fact, something of a hastily-welded cut-and-shut job: one minute you’re plodding through World 1-1, the classic template for idling indie designers everywhere. You’re punching blocks, jumping, and eating mushrooms, and then, all of a sudden, you’re switching to Tetris mode and laying down groups of entirely new blocks so as to overcome various sprawling impasses. Throughout its short running time, Tuper Tario Tros. plays fast and loose with the classics: in Tetris mode, you can either cancel lines out by completing them, or simply lay new paths to use in platforming. Equally, I suspect it was made fairly quickly, too. After all, when playing as Mario, the sprint option, which is one of the things that makes Nintendo’s masterpiece so deeply playable in the first place, is scandalously absent. I couldn’t find it, anyway.
So it’s a little cludgy at times, but it has a wonderful sketched-in energy, and it makes up for its rough edges by being so consistently interesting. Who knew? It turns out that Tetris pieces work very well in a side-scrolling platformer, while Mario’s race-tuned move-set is peculiarly suited to life in a puzzle game too – even if he can’t sprint anymore. With clever designers in charge, the two games can fit together pretty smartly, in other words, and when you reach the end of the level and climb that famous flagpole for - what? - the millionth time, only to find a blank outline where your castle should be, it’s a rare player who won’t know exactly what to do.