Puggsy

About Puggsy

Puggsy (1993) is Traveller's Tales' physics-driven puzzle platformer in which an orange space-hopper-like alien hunts for the spaceship stolen by the raccoon natives of The Planet.

Puggsy in Depth

Puggsy, an orange alien resembling a space hopper, lands his spaceship on The Planet intending to return home, but the planet's raccoon natives steal it. The game crosses a conventional platformer, with the usual enemies and various ways to kill them, with a puzzle game in which Puggsy often has to find objects and carry them to a particular place or use them to finish a level. Some objects act as power-ups, letting him survive a hit or two, speeding him up or making him briefly invincible, and others, such as guns with mostly unrefillable ammunition, help temporarily.

Objects follow a physics-based system that was innovative at the time: they can be thrown, each has its own weight, and careless stacks topple. Puggsy can carry a stack along flat ground, but on a slope everything except the bottom item tends to scatter. Items carried out of a level's exit are worth different scores, and a heart gives an extra life. Objects range from shells, weights, matches, keys and balloons to cups, barrels, clue-giving chests, knives and candles. There are 57 levels, 16 of them secret, six bosses, nine on Mega-CD, and five training levels under the "Junior" option, and not every level or boss must be beaten to finish.

Making Puggsy

Traveller's Tales developed it and Psygnosis published it for the Mega Drive, Mega-CD and Amiga in Europe in October 1993 and in North America on 6 January 1994. MegaTech called it "excellently designed and thought-out", and GamePro, reviewing the Mega-CD version, praised its controls, graphics, sound, challenge and detail, though it predicted veterans would tire of it faster than younger players.