This is a game devised by people with, er, curiously fuelled imaginations. It's like this, you see... Mr and Mrs Skweek gave birth to lots and lots of Skweekettes - cuddly, furry little blobs. Like all babies, they seemed cute at first, but - after the sight of one particularly disgusting nappy too many - their parents realised the Skweekettes were only happy when causing endless disruption. Then it all got nasty - they kidnapped a space-bus driver and threatened to paint the entire planet pink... And you're the sucket who has to put 'em all to bed and save the Earth from looking sickeningly cute.
It's alright, it's from France. And it's a sequel. The original Skweek was released in 1989 and was a puzzle game with a slightly bizarre theme. Tink Skweeks is a puzzle game with an immensely bizarre theme, some fuzzy, cutesy graphics and distinctly unhinged sound effects.
There are 101 levels. Each one is a single screen maze which contains one or more Tiny Skweeks, the coloured circles - or sleepers - which represent their beds and, usually, some annoying obstacles. The idea is to work out a path to the bed, click on the Skweek of the corresponding colour and guide him to his slumber. The Skweek then waddles blindly in the desired direction until he bumps into something. Complications abound in the form of one-way arrows, surprise boxes - which repel any Skweeks that wander too close, doors - which can only be opened by a Skweek of the same colour - and switches which must be thrown to light up the beds on some of the later levels.
Now for the good news. You get occasional boosts in the form of sleepers - which automatically send certain coloured Skweeks into a doze, tele-transporters - which teleport Skweeks to otherwise inaccessible areas of the screen, and time, life and immunity bonuses to make the game just that tiny bit more varied. Every level has a code, so instead of worrying about how much progress you're making, you have to keep track of all those tatty bits of paper with your level-codes written on them - if you want to avoid starting from the beginning every time you lose all your lives, that is.
Verdict
Although Tiny Skweeks doesn't have the blinding originality of its genre-cousins, Lemmings or Push-Over, it's still a cheeky and refreshingly bizarre puzzle-'em-up which holds your attention for a few screens, until you get stuck. Then you write down the code and come back to the action when you feel like it. It's more of a charmer than a gripper and, although you may find yourself sneaking the occasional crafty crack at the level that had you stumped, you're not about to lose any serious sleep over it. The game takes a suspicious amount of time to display any hard variety and there's the sense that, within the 101 levels, there are really only 30 or 40 different challenges glued together and shifted around to suit the needs of the maze.
An engaging enough puzzler which justifies its existence, but not its price.