Kuru Kuru Kururin

The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This propagates to the requisite braking power needed for the turn, the best line to take through the curve, and the torque and power the engine is putting out; each variation adds nuance to later actions. Even when the system is abstractly solvable, the variables are so granular and dynamics so nonlinear that reproducing the solution is never trivial. The Kururin series does this without the same density or non-linearity by instead constantly turning Kururin’s long, stick-like ship while punishing contact with any obstacles. The player tracks little other the rotation of the ship and the location of moving obstacles, yet small variations in timing change the phase of the ship’s rotation for future movement, restricting viable movement through future corridors. While this lacks the analog granularity of car control, Kururin’s ticky-tacky movement and three discrete speed settings make up for it by clamping the player’s precision, asking them to alternate between the separate speed modes rather than key in a specific analog value. This reconstitutes the subtle variations of each run that racing games exhibit, elevating Kururin to their level in the confines of a handheld d-pad.

Given the weight of that design philosophy, Eighting opts to take it slow in this first entry, offering choreographed, static obstacle courses and cycle-based projectiles rather than anything high-concept. Their most intriguing tool is the springs, which, when compressed by the edge of Kururin’s ship, reverses the ship’s rotation direction. The spring initially glues together sections that arc in opposite directions purely to layer them together in limited space, but as the designs become less restricted, the springs offer more choices on how the player approaches ambiguously spaced obstacles. By unevenly timing consecutive bounces on a free spring, the player shifts their rotation’s phase, potentially aligning it differently with cycled obstacles. Finding ways to complete one section with the unintended or more difficult rotation direction speeds up the player when they skip springs later and potentially sets up continuous movement through these sections instead of waiting for a particular angle. Springs also become lethal obstacles in late-game levels, disrupting the intended rotation and crashing the player into walls. Some levels go all in on this and fill arenas full of springs to navigate through, contextualizing bounces as necessary or run-ending in rapid, alternating succession.

For those who tire of the shaggy levels at the end of the main mode, the game offers a challenge mode of 55 bite-sized stages, each of which hone in on a particular idea. In this stage, the two block sets to the right and two unseen sets below alternate presses towards the center, with the goal area just out of view to the bottom right. The player must decide which path to take and which way to rotate based on the lanes the blocks create each cycle.

One may note that the latter design has a bit of a “shitpost” feel to it; indeed, much of the mid-game sags under obstacles strewn around larger areas seemingly randomly, with the puzzle aspect centering less around execution and more around finding an ideal route. In an extremely non-emergent game as Kururin, this design tends to make solutions uncaptivating and potentially trivial without careful hand-tuning, and these levels exhibit a lack of the latter more often than not. When, in the primary final world, the game explores maze-like, non-linear structures, it isolates them, buffering them with linear projectile gauntlets. These cause levels to explode into the multi-minute range after encouraging tight, sub-30 second optimal times prior, which reduces the design focus, showing little commitment to certain obstacle concepts past their initial appearance. The penultimate world, by comparison, explicitly themes itself around projectile-generating contraptions and retains focus for each level, but with the limited obstacle roster, the designers have already shown their whole hand by the time the player arrives. Accordingly, if the player unlocks the true final world, it veers in the other direction completely by stripping out everything but the walls and the springs, locking the player in for grueling, precise stages with no checkpoints for minutes at a time.