An expanded game of Sutte Hakkun
This version was released for use with the Nintendo Power cartridge, and included all the levels designed by game creators (which wasn't possible to do with the 8MB Satellaview Memory Pak). It was afterwards released as a Super Famicom standard cartridge and also for the japanese Wii and Wii U Virtual Console. Sutte Hakkun is a puzzle action game in the shape of a platformer. The playing character is an abundant-beaked bird resembling a penguin, named Hakkun, that is able to walk and jump but not to fly. The Rainbow of Happiness shined in the sky above Peaceful Islands: one day it broke apart and now Hakkun has to track down, collect, and put together all rainbow crystals to relive it. The gameplay hinges upon two elements: blocks and potions, the latter of several colours. Hakku makes its way through levels by changing the position of blocks — that will be done by swallowing them to release them on an other place then — and sucking potions — that are to be injected to blocks by the beak, endowing them with new properties consequential to the colour of the fluid — from jars. A level is cleared when the rainbow shards in it are collected. Neither a time limit nor enemy characters are there impeding Hakkun's way. Equally distinctive is the score system: a set number of points is given at the beginning of each level, and a decrease happens with any move made, thus rewarding the player for completing levels with as little moves as possible.
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Sutte Hakkun doesn’t really have a narrative. It was originally released in chunks over the SFC’s Satellaview service over the course of 1997, with a RAM cart download and a dedicated cart released containing the whole collection (and a little bit more) in 1998. It’s also the first game Indieszero did! (who are otherwise most famous for the Theatrhythm games and the first two Retro Game Challenge games, I’d reckon). There really is no story of any kind though, so far as I can tell. You play as Hakkun, and you need to find your way to getting all of the rainbows in all 100 levels to get to the credits. This is very much a game just about completing the puzzles, to the point it even acknowledges and actively discourages you from looking at the hints, as it warns you it’ll be marked on your save file forever (and they’re not kidding about that).
As for the gameplay, it’s quite simple, but they do a LOT with that simplicity. As Hakkun, a weird mosquito-kiwi-thing, you can use your beak(?) to suck in both colors, blocks, and other objects and then spit them out again. Your colors are red, blue, and yellow, and things you can put them in are blocks as well as your buddy Makkun to give each respectively different behaviors. Red makes blocks go up & down and makes Makkun springy. Blue makes blocks go left and right and makes Makkun walk back and forth. Yellow makes blocks go up and down diagonally and Makkun ground-pound in place (to continuously cycle switches, should you need to). There are some advanced techniques, like holding down the button to maintain sucking in while you jump about, jumping around corners by jumping at the veeery edge of a corner, and quickly spitting out and sucking in several objects over the course of one fall, but other than that, it’s all about your ingenuity on using these simple tools to reach the end of each stage. It’s a very well designed puzzle platformer. It gets pretty bastard-hard around world 6 of 10 (and only goes up from there), but if you’re a puzzle fan, you’ll likely get a lot of enjoyment out of this.
The presentation is pretty simple, but also very effective. It’s very reminiscent of something like Umihara Kawase with the floating platforms over fixed-ish backgrounds, but the stylized simplicity gave me big vibes of later games like BoxBoy as well. There’s never any ambiguity or confusion over puzzle mechanics because of the visuals though, so that’s an A+ design choice in my book at least~. The music is also very fun! Each of the 10 worlds (including the post-game extra world) has its own theme that’ll play in all 10 of its levels, and they’re all jaunty and fun. They gave me just as big Kirby vibes as they did Wario Land vibes, so take from that what you will for their particular brand of jauntiness, but I also enjoyed them a lot either way x3
Verdict: Recommended. The premise might be too simple and the difficulty too high for many, but if you’re into puzzle platformers or just puzzle games in general, you’ll probably have a great time with Sutte Hakkun. I want to and I will say that if you really enjoyed something like Baba Is You, you’ll likely enjoy this a lot, but there are enough levels that do actually require a significant degree of platforming dexterity that I can’t say with complete confidence that the two games have perfect crossover in their appeal. Either way, this is an excellent puzzle game, and a very fun thing to hunt down the translation patch for if you wanted to play it with English menus as well~.
It's a puzzle game. That's a good thing.
10/10.