Like any good trailer, it made the gameplay look fast-paced and intense in the stressful sort of way that any good puzzle game is. So I thought I'd be spending most of my time doing stuff like this:

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Notice how it conveniently cuts out when the mice start heading in the right direction. That's because in order to get to the meat of the actual puzzle-solving here, you have to sit through many, many moments just watching mice slink along in succession like this:

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To alleviate this, the game lets you fast-forward to expedite the whole mice-walking process. But it's already a bad sign if a game needs to have a fast-forward button in the first place. There's a big, empty space in the middle of the central gameplay loop here. In-between experimenting and seeing the results of whatever testy maneuver you tried to pull off, you have to just...sit there and see what happens.

That's not a satisfying feeling. It gets better over time as the levels in MouseCraft become larger and more complex. But the waiting never really goes away.

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When I compare it to another new puzzle game like Pushmo World, MouseCraft comes up short. And that's for a very simple reason: when your character Mallo pulls out the Tetris-like blocks in that new Nintendo game, he can push them back in immediately. There's an endless cycle of trying and retrying combinations of different shapes and maneuvers until you find the one that actually fits. Being able to try these all out so easily and quickly is what makes it work so well. I fell in love with Pushmo World after playing through one of the tutorial levels. I had to sit through the entire first chunk of MouseCraft, in comparison, before the levels started getting tricky enough to pique my interest.

Pushmo World and MouseCraft are very different games, so comparing the two can only go so far. But still: the problem that MouseCraft highlights is one at the heart of the Lemmings paradigm. It's very hard to make the sensation of juggling so many moving parts, trying to control a handful of disinterested and autonomous bodies, fun as opposed to frustrating. The only games I've played recently that manage to pull this off expertly enough to make the quirky brand of virtual cat-herding seem worthy of gamers' attention were From Dust and Pikmin. Everything else that toyed with similar ideas felt like herding actual cats.

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I'm sorry, Lemmings. I guess this is goodbye. Hopefully, that's just for now.

Image by Jim Cooke.

To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.