Probably the Best Value Game you Might Pick up This Year
I’m still confused that GluMe is less than £5. I’ve played AAA games for less time than I’ve played this, and I’ve enjoyed them less too. GluMe may look small and indie, but it’s dense as dark matter.
You’re probably looking at screenshots and thinking ‘what could be so great about this?’. We made that mistake too. GluMe presents as a pretty standard sokoban or maze game, with bog-standard graphics and the same 12×7 grid over and over again. If you’re only going by its Xbox Store page, you’d be forgiven for giving GluMe a miss.
A Simple Start to Complicated Endings
GluMe has a consistent rule across its 80 levels. You need to grab all of the gems. As soon as you snag the very last one, GluMe moves onto the next layout. So, you’re using the thumbstick to wander about the top-down level, grabbing treasure and hoping that the next leap is the leap home.
The thing is, the gems are often in impossible-to-reach places. They might be castaway on an island, surrounded by holes, or ensconced in a block. As a single 1×1 slime, you can’t reach them. You might tumble into a hole that’s bigger than you, for example. So the solution is to ‘glu’ yourself to another slime.
These slimes are grey and sleeping in the level. As soon as you move into a neighbouring space, you glom onto each other. If you attach from the top, you become a 1×2 slime. If you attach from the side, you become a 2×1 slime. You need to anticipate the shape that you will need to complete the level, as some walls might block a particular shape, or a hole might need you to be a different shape. Regardless of what your shape is, as long as one of you is touching ground at any time, you can span huge chasms.
The Most Fun You Can Have with Slime
It’s hard to convey how elegant this is. With this one mechanic, a whole host of permutations factor in. Which grey slime do you attach to first? Do you attach yourself at all? What shape do you make yourself? What order should you pick up the gems? We would often spend the first ten minutes of each level standing still, working out the flow through a level, and which Tetris-shaped block we eventually wanted to turn into. ‘Ah, we want to be a 2×2 this time.’
GluMe could have feasibly stopped there, delivered 30 levels and run away with our cash, chuckling into the night. But it keeps on delivering, adding more mechanics and secrets to make the £4.19 price tag seem ludicrous.
GluMe keeps chucking in ideas. It starts with sokoban-style blocks that can be nudged around, filling gaps that can’t be stretched over. Then enemies start crawling in too. There are enemies that fire arrows (once only, so you can trigger them and then ignore them), and blocks that hunt you as long as you’re in a decent proximity and are in a cardinal direction of them. GluMe doesn’t play out in real-time – it works on ‘moves’, which means you can stop to think about the actions of enemies – so it never deviates into ‘action’ territory.
Swords can destroy greyed out slimes that you don’t need. Bombs can be pushed a small distance before exploding. Spike-traps rise and fall, while gem blocks need to be tossed into the void before you can collect their gem. There’s a host of these ideas, and there’s plenty of room in its 80 levels to explore each mechanic fully.
A Warning: This is Not a Cozy Puzzler
The challenge-o-meter has GluMe somewhere over to the right, near ‘Devious’. While there are 80 levels here, it’s entirely possible to be stuck on one for fifteen, thirty minutes. The arenas might look simple, but there are just so, so many ways to approach them, and that means you can rarely brute-force them. You need to genuinely consider the shapes you need to work towards, and the order of gems.
If that sounds daunting, it can be. It’s a failing of GluMe that a level can completely halt the experience. You can’t skip levels, you can’t get a hint, and the Undo feature is pretty much non-existent. Since the level order is linear, you can send yourself into a rage-quit spiral. There are online walkthroughs, which saved our bacon a couple of times, but I can’t help thinking that GluMe could have offered some help of its own.
While GluMe doesn’t help to make the experience easier for a player, it does offer ways to make it more challenging. There are plenty of secrets in the levels, with several hidden shadow-slimes that can only be observed if you’re next to them. There are also bonus levels which are an absolute treat. These take your Puyo-Puyo looking character to a location where you play entirely new games. You can suddenly be fishing, or playing a game of Tetris. It’s utterly random and completely joyful.
GluMe Suckered Onto us like a Leech
After 80 levels, I was bruised from head to toe. I had grappled with dozens of new mechanics, unravelled some incredibly difficult puzzles, and even pocketed the odd collectible. But it was the kind of bruising that I enjoy. I felt like I had truly tested myself, and that GluMe had rewarded my efforts with a revolving door of ideas.
And all that for £4.19! At a time when we’re weighing up the value of a GTA VI or a Steam Machine, it’s almost gratuitous in how generous GluMe is. The hardcore puzzling and simple graphics might not be for everyone, but if you even have a fraction of interest, you should fuse yourself to GluMe right away.
Important Links
GluMe Sticks To The Puzzle Formula – https://www.thexboxhub.com/glume-sticks-to-the-puzzle-formula/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/glume-xbox-edition/9P2Z47LK44SH/0010
