Pureya review

Imagine, if you will, if WarioWare and Peggle had a baby, because that is my best summary of Pureya, a staggeringly quickfire affair that takes old school pixel art as its aesthetic basis and transports you into a fast moving maelstrom that gives you just ten seconds in each minigame to earn the in-game currency of marbles to ping around a pachinko machine between levels.

The minigames don’t come with an overt descriptive guide like WarioWare, you are just dropped in and given the blink of an eye to figure out what to do. Controls are as simple as the left and right directions, and there are 30 different scenarios to get to grips with, all of which look and feel a bit like they have been plucked out of the library of an Intellivision or Atari 2600.

The games are very simple in their execution and can involve things like a cute pixel-y penguin skating across ice, guiding a paper aeroplane, or controlling a pirate ship and aiming to catch marbles and avoid cannonballs. As things move forward the speed of the games increases incrementally, along with the difficulty.

The marbles you earn are plonked into the pachinko machine and it is here that you unlock new levels to play, as well as random prizes such as artwork which comes in the form of collectable pieces that can be assembled like a jigsaw. The problem is, that by its very nature traditional pachinko machines are very much a case of luck over skill, so you do find yourself busting your ass to snaffle more marbles than a Hungry Hungry Hippo only to see them fall to waste on the peg-strewn Japanese arcade parlour favourite.

Some will like this element of the unpredictable, but if like me you expect the rewards to match the graft, it will be frustrating. Some of the minigames are better than others, two. A vine hoping affair with monkeys leaping between dangling fauna is terrific and a real test of skill, and there are others than provide something of a nod and a wink towards arcade classics like Missile Command and Asteroids that I enjoyed. Others are frustrating or random in their execution and a lesson in harsh old-school gaming punishment or overly quirky and unresponsive design.

Beyond the main game loop there isn’t a great deal else to do, aside from an endless mode that lets you play microgames to your hearts content, a customisable soundtrack, and some quite funny unlockables that allow you to alter the characters in some of the games.

That said, this is a pretty damn original concept and is a perfectly fine way to waste a bit of time, suited as it is to pick up and play mobile gaming, and works well for those who like their games short and sweet, or people with a short attention span. Pureya is an original, if short lived take on the microgame genre that is a half decent way to while away a bit of time.