It seems I'm not sufficiently "Mario'd out" after completing Super Mario Bros. Wonder earlier this month so here I am instead playing Suzy Cube, the "we have Super Mario 3D Land at home" of Indie 3D platformers. All right, I'm being a little unkind here: it's rare to see someone take on the throne so brazenly like this and, all else aside, it's remarkable the developers managed to make this game feel about as good as a Mario to play. Its mere wisp of a plot has Suzy Cube, a girl with a cube for a head and I believe the second video game allusion to Suzi Quatro I've seen this week (Gerstmann was playing the NES pool sim Break Time for his regular NES ranking show, and that also had a "Suzy Cue"), get dragooned into recovering the kingdom's treasure after it gets burgled. She sets off across a series of mostly disconnected worlds—the levels have themes like "snowy" and "desert" but they're not consistent within a single world; the game preferring instead a more random approach.

These worlds have four regular levels each (fairly big ones too) and then culminate in a boss fight, which is preceded by a more time-intensive platforming gauntlet, and finally a bonus secret stage which tend to be smaller, more experimental courses. There's five worlds total, and then a final string of a dozen "special world" levels that are a little more challenging than anything in the main game progression. That 3D Land comparison isn't just me being my usual reductive self, by the way: the courses are fully 3D but are also very linear, with the scant few diversions from the critical path leading to extra lives or the game's main set of optional collectibles (a trio of blue stars per course). The blue stars can be tough to locate but the game throws you the same bone 3D Land/World does by acknowledging the ones you've found in the order they appear in the level: if the middle one's missing, you can be sure it's located somewhere between where you found the first and third. Suzy Cube also gives you a few power-up "suits" which may have stages built around their mechanics. The first of these is simply a cap that lets you take an extra hit (the standard super mushroom, in other words), the second gives you a double-jump and slow-fall skill to make platforming easier, and the third lets you ground-pound sturdy enemies and breakable terrain. It's sometimes worth carrying these upgrades over to other stages, but the chances are you'll be fine without them: the courses usually provide any power-ups you might need.

Where Suzy Cube perhaps falters a bit when trying to keep up with Mario is in its presentation. Graphically, I'd kindly suggest that Suzy Cube is operating with "programmer graphics": deliberately simple designs and models that serve to make it easier to playtest everything before the artists show up with the real deal. Suzy Cube isn't trying to hide that it was made for mobile devices first and foremost with its pleasingly rounded and rudimentary UI and aesthetic, and while it's functional enough it doesn't really stand out either. The music is worse: each course has what feels like a 10 second loop which starts to grate long before the finish line. There is one scenario in which these limited loops are beneficial though, and that's in the game's sole attempt to recreate that Beep Block Skyway level where your platforming has to match the BGM as platforms appear and disappear with the beat. It overall gives the game a thrown together feel, like the designers spent all their time trying to make it feel as fluid and precise as Mario in the way it controls that everything else was an afterthought. Honestly, if I was playing game development triage and trying to assign time to various divisions like I was partitioning out points for a RPG character build, I'd probably also go full "gameplay" and let "graphics" and "sound" be my dump stats.

In terms of trying to match Mario's prestigious level design variety, I'd say that Suzy Cube acquits itself well enough. There's a whole level that gives itself over to more of a classic Zelda top-down dungeon style as you pass through doors and activate switches one room transition at a time. Others might include quickly ascending or descending through the level, spinning or disappearing platforms, dodging missiles while you run across destructible bridges, sliding down slopes to avoid avalanches, and the occasional more open stages that allow for a bit more exploration. The highlights for the game's imagination are in those shorter secret stages I mentioned: each one has its own gimmick, though they don't always land.

Anyway, the game's a pretty simple homage to those more railroaded 3D platformers that Mario became for a short while there between Sunshine and Odyssey and, given it has its priorities straight, I can't say I dislike it much. Hunting down those blue stars was occasionally a challenge and it flows quite well for the most part, the exceptions being those requiring a bit more momentum/inertia-based trickery like for instance with those spinning block platforms so beloved of the Steal My Sunshine crew or the icy slides: I imagine trying to get all those physics right was a headache and a half. The game could also be a bit unfortunately glitchy on Steam as well: I had it crash on the map selection screen a few times (having that be the least stable part of your game is a new one for me) and the achievement for finding all 123 blue stars in the game was glitched out too—there's even a guide telling you how to effectively patch the game yourself to earn it since the dev seems to have given up on patching it themselves. Tells you plenty, I suppose. Still, as cheap and cheerful Indie alternatives to Nintendo first-party games (that remain eternally at their recommended retail prices) go, you could certainly do worse.

Rating: 4 out of 5.