Kururin Paradise

The Helirin’s rotation in the Kururin games has a particular dynamic: certain rotation angles will always reoccur provided the player has space to sit and wait. Safe zones often bookend major obstacle sections, so a start-and-stop tendency arises, where arriving in a safe zone with the wrong angle to start the next section incurs a short break to let it spin into place. The first Kururin game suffered from this in its larger stages specifically thanks to cyclical obstacles, each requiring a synchronization between the Helirin and the obstacle. Depending on the difference in frequency between the two cycles, waiting for both to line up could potentially take multiple rotations without prior planning. While the series’s staple springs, which change the Helirin’s direction of rotation, could help by altering the phase over multiple bounces, most applications of these boiled down to bouncing between parallel springs, offering only minor improvements over unassisted waiting. Kururin Paradise smartly fixes this by giving the player control over their rotation speed. Even with only a single speed increase to work with, the player has significantly more leverage on how to synchronize with obstacles or avoid waiting. In turn, the designers decrease the amount of safe zones in each level, resulting in more compact and intense design overall.

This design tweak allows Eighting to move away from the segmented gauntlets that defined Kuru Kuru Kururin’s endgame and towards intricate, tightly wound obstacles that require rotation speed modulation while in motion. The phenomenal Clock Tower Dial exemplifies this: in it, a clock-face maze with two giant clock hands (one clockwise, one counter-clockwise) sits in the middle, bookended by two small obstacle-generator sections. The clock face is deceptively open, but one quickly finds that the looming hands prevents one from staying in place, and the design of the different corridors within the clock face make it necessary to switch between clockwise and counter-clockwise movement to get a key tucked into the top of the clock.¹ Later levels experiment with dynamic obstacles, such as ghosts that jump onto the ship and slow it down and sliding walls that change the layout of the level as it progresses. Each of these disrupts the player’s movement or disorients them. Other levels retain the open routing of the clock level, often through seemingly random wall structures that offer multiple different routes with escalating difficulty depending on where one finds crevices to sneak through. In these ways, Paradise makes strides towards vastly widening the palette of obstacles and design paradigms the series has access to.

The level Sunset Beach features a quicksand gimmick that sweeps the Helirin along with it. It also leans into an elevated version of certain levels from the first game, where many dispersed obstacles form alternate paths for the player to suss out.

Punctuating the proceedings are a bevy of minigames, mandatory here to reveal the true ending. In the best cases, this involves a twist upon the core mechanics of the game, such as changing the length of the Helirin over time or having it carry items that jut out from the tips of its blades. A particular lawnmower game provides an interesting test in how to actually cover area with the Helirin, as opposed to only avoiding obstacle contact, by having its blades slice grass in a large field. Others are perfunctory, such as in a Balloon Fight-esque minigame early on, or downright unpleasant, as in the strict and unwieldy racing minigame. For players that grumble their way through these, they will at least be impressed by the rich art, now primarily hand-drawn rather leaning on crunchy pre-rendered models. In one world, the machinery of the first game is translated into a 19th-century industrial fantasy, with parallaxed self-operating levers and such against cottages far in the distance. Meanwhile, the clock level and its kin use the supposed background as an iron layer smushed against the camera, with the play-area corridors now a cut-through into swirling gears and pulleys operating behind the shielding.