Review She Remembered Caterpillars (Switch)

Game: She Remembered Caterpillars
System: Nintendo Switch
Developer/Publisher: Jumpsuit Entertainment/Ysbryd Games
Price: $11.99| £8.99| €11.99
Age Rating: EU 3+/ USA E
Release Date: 28th March 2019
Also Available On: Steam/IOS

Review code kindly provided by Ysbryd Games

She Remembered Caterpillars is described as “a fungipunk fantasy about love, loss and holding on”. 40 levels of colour matching puzzles await the player with beautiful hand drawn environments.  In the game, you are tasked with guiding little big headed coloured sprites which are called Gammies to white pads.

Sounds pretty easy you might say, however as with most puzzle games all is not as easy as it seems, and you would be surprised just how much these color-based challenges can stump you.

Each level is an island with pathways and platforms. Using the controls or touchscreen you guide the Gammies  to their goal on a white pad. They must cross coloured bridges and go through coloured gates to get to the pad.

Guide the Gammies

The difficulty of the game is getting them to their pad as only some Gammies can go through some coloured gates and bridges and not others. The game introduces the player to its play style gradually, one element at a time so it’s easy to pick up. Let me describe how it works.

A coloured bridge lets any Gammie that contains that colour go across, so a red bridge can be crossed by a red Gammie and by an orange or a purple Gammie  as those Gammies contain red alongside another colour. In reverse, coloured gates stop Gammies which contain those colours. So a red gate will not give entry to red, orange or purple gammie.

Gammies can be merged together to make other colours and can be split up again with the push of a button or the flick of a finger on the touch screen.

So you can merge a blue Gammie with a red to make a purple Gammie to help the blue one thats been merged cross a bridge. Next obstacle: now they can’t pass through a red gate. What to do? Well, that’s where you come in and figure it out.

This is a logic puzzle as you really do have to think about where to move the Gammies to to get them to their goal, which colours to merge together to get them across a particular bridge.

Puzzles start out easy and as you progress other coloured Gammies are introduced to the game play. I should also mention that She Remembered Caterpillars can be played by colour blind players as all the Gammies, bridges and gates are also shape coded as well as coloured, a red Gammie is square, a blue Gammie is round and so on.

This is a great idea from the developers as few games cater for people who are colour blind!

Controls, visuals and soundtrack

All forty levels offer the player a challenge. The hand drawn levels are gorgeous and the animation on each of the Gammies and their surroundings creates a unique visual style.

As I’ve said controls are touch screen and joycon or a combination of both as I found myself playing the game that way. Which ever way you control the Gammies through their environment, the controls system is well executed.

As your puzzling your way through She Remembered Caterpillars you will be listening to somewhat of an unusual soundtrack in my opinion. That’s not saying it’s a bad soundtrack. Quite the opposite, as it does gel with the background environment and the Gammies. It’s a series of noises from birds tweeting to the sound of the wind blowing. I even heard crickets chirping and the odd croak from a frog, all incorporated into some music.

Puzzling storyline?

You may have noticed that through out this review I haven’t mentioned the storyline, the reason for this is I’m not entirely sure what the story line is about. After having completed the game and taken a day or two to think about it, I still haven’t come up with a definite answer. I decided it’s one of two things, either a daughters quest to save her father, or a parent grieving for their child.

The story is told to you in small snippets of text at the start of each puzzle. Then you complete the puzzle and another section of the story appears. However some of those story snippets just didn’t make much sense to me. Maybe it’s because they are split up into those short snippets and once I concentrated on completing the puzzle I’d lost track of the story.

Have the developers written the story so that each player takes away a different emotion from their story? For myself it didn’t gel with the puzzles i was playing. That’s maybe because I didn’t quite “grasp” the storyline.

Conclusion

Even though I didn’t get the story that didn’t stop me wanting to complete the game. It’s a lovely brain busting logic game with gorgeous environments and great animation of the Gammies as you move them around. Everything worked smoothly, it’s a very enjoyable puzzle game.

Don’t let my problem with the narrative not gelling with the gameplay put you off having She Remembered Caterpillars in your Nintendo Switch library. You would be missing out on a gem of a puzzle game.

I like it a lot.