Kururin Squash

Where Kururin Paradise poured the scrappy look of the original Kuru Kuru Kururin into a sleeker, cheerier skin, Kururin Squash completely revamps the look and feel with lush 3D backgrounds and and a focus on gentler curves. The flat-shaded cartoon interludes of Paradise give way to a puppet show aesthetic, down to curtains that open on the title card and characters printed on cardboard with articulated, flapping arms. Their non-stop gesticulating combined with the movement of the backgrounds, replete with signs of organic life and community, infuses the atmosphere with an invitation for the player to live in its world. Kururin had never been a brooding or violent series, but the grinning brutality of the obstacle gauntlets finally melts away in Squash.

The fundamentals of the gameplay follow suit. Squash replaces the stark digital control of the Helirin with a soft analog surface conducive to the sloping arcs of the game’s labyrinths. The level designers run with this concept by severely limiting their use of jagged edges and square turns in the map design; there’s simultaneously a reduced propensity for the “shitpost” jumble maps from prior entries. Squash tenderly on-ramps the difficulty in a way that Paradise eschewed outright and the original title manifested only in lack of scenario robustness, and it partially succeeds here due to a shift away from time trials. Squash introduces a collectible coin system to each level that adds an extra objective: collect every single coin – preferably without getting hit – irrespective of time. Explicit optional areas stuffed with coins now branch off from the main path in each level, often with a tight or obstructed corridor leading to them. In other cases, the game presents a tighter shortcut versus a longer coin-filled area, which in turn downplays the series’ unique tendency for semi-accidental shortcuts. This design paradigm broadens the game space and multiplies viable objectives as compared to its predecessors, lowering the initial difficulty while opening a path to skill-play for those interested.

Although areas are more often broken up by smooth-grooved hallways in this entry, there are occasional tighter levels that experiment with obstacles interacting in uncomfortable areas. [src]

Among the most strikingly conceptualized of these is level 2-7, which harnesses a gate open/shut mechanic manipulated via an underwater dial. The second instance of this obstacle in the level closes a flowing conduit, easing an associated stream of log obstacles while shutting an additional gate later in the level. This makes collecting a handful of coins near the opening of the conduit easier and clears flotsam from a nearby chokepoint. However, closing the additional gate shuts off a short spike-ball field in the second half, leaving only a longer path around it. On a casual attempt, a player would likely close the conduit and take the long way; on a time trial attempt, the player navigates around additional obstacles in the chokepoint and the shortcut. When collecting coins, one needs to cover both paths: they can take the shortcut route, back out, open the conduit, and then take the long path, collecting coins along the way. It shows a remarkable reconfiguration of the designers’ conception of Kururin with these foreign elements: persistent state across the level based on player actions, backtracking, non-linear sequence order, and a divorce from the strictness of the point-A-to-B design the series had hewed to.¹ Only a small group of levels follow in 2-7’s footsteps, but the implementation here suggests a less rigid approach to what Kururin could be as a puzzle concept.

The new Helirin abilities also feed into this, although with less laudable results. Each world introduces an ability for the Helirin’s toolkit used for a handful of maps tailored around the gimmick. As seen in 2-7, the Helirin dives underwater to a secondary layer before coming back up for air; this particular ability adds positional nuance to the Helirin’s control and is used to stagger obstacles and add a timed “air gauge” element. The others are less essential. Worlds 1 and 5 explore punching and shooting abilities, respectively, that extend out of the tips of the Helirin’s blades, and thus utilizing them in a particular direction requires waiting for the Helirin’s rotation to reach an appropriate point. The levels that use these features err too often on the side of caution by jettisoning any consideration of the Helirin’s rotation in favor of wide open spaces to allow room for the requisite aiming. These also make coin collecting a slog, as they tend to require killing the new in-stage enemies within these specific worlds. World 3’s gimmick – sliding the Helirin on a rail while adding flamethrowers to the vehicle – veers from the otherwise snappy pace with auto-scroller sections. World 4’s tornado shooting gimmick lends itself to applications around placing persistent tornadoes, but the slow fire rate and unintuitive movement integration makes these sections soggy as well. Luckily, the new boss fights benefit tremendously from each mechanic by implementing many granular phases and tailoring each boss’s movement to the mechanical particularities. Otherwise, the designers hit a bit of a brick wall on extrapolating each gimmick outside the campaign, as the extra stages in the challenge mode don’t feature any of them at all.