Critter Crunch is a game about managing a family. It’s a falling tile game with a field balance that looks a bit like inverted Tetris, the descending action of Space Invaders, and a variation on the tried-and-true match-three elimination mechanic of Bejeweled. Unlike most tile games, the player can indefinitely manipulate the field as she wishes (so long as none of the tiles reach the bottom of the screen). The best part about it is the fictive context of the game: you’re an animal named Biggs whose responsibility it is to keep an entire food chain of ridiculously lazy critters fed and happy.

Back in 1997, Janet Murray wrote a book called Hamlet on the Holodeck. This is game studies canon, and it’s about what at the time seemed the most probable direction of development for interactive entertainment and narrative: virtual reality. Murray is one of the prime movers of game scholarship, establishing what was for a long time called the narratological school of game studies. Much of the book’s legacy comes from a controversial statement Murray makes about Tetris: it’s a game about the contemporary labor condition of an office worker. Work descends upon your desk, and you’ve got to organize it before you can send it off. This seems intuitive, especially considering the now-established tradition of casual puzzle games being used as recreation in between busy times at home and in the office, but it upset quite a few people who thought that Murray was mapping her own dominant narrative interpretation onto what was an abstract, pure-play experience.

Raph Koster, in his A Theory of Fun, later advanced the discussion of Tetris by showing how the same game could take on new meaning when contextualized with graphical assets. In a provocative thought experiment, Koster suggested replacing the contorted tetrons with the bodies of the dead--effectively making a game about mass graves and the Holocaust. The idea was later taken up by a Brazilian game developer, resulting in the highly disturbing Calabouco Tetrico.

But something about Murray’s original interpretation latched on. Jason Rohrer’s best work to date, Gravitation, has the player drawing inspiration from time spent playing catch with a little girl (read: family time) in order to motivate a vertical quest for star-shaped prizes that morph into burdensome tiles. The more stars the player finds, the more tiles pile up down at the bottom of the level. Points are awarded for pushing the tiles into a furnace shortly after they fall, but doing so quickly becomes more and more difficult as the tiles accrue. This is an inversion of Murray’s story about Tetris, an active search for work that repays the player in toil (and possibly heartbreak).

Critter Crunch is a spiritual successor to this legacy, fully contextualized in Koster's sense to be more about family life than it is about office work. The descending throng of hungry critters connects it to another recent adaptation of Space Invaders, a parodic newsgame about the breast-feeding tribulations of “Octomom” Nadya Suleman by L’Agence Torich called The Ocuplet’s Game. Keeping a family fed is thankless work, but Critter Crunch manages to make it fun primarily through its infinite configurability and charming art style.

The game draws its visual aesthetic from early Ghibli work like Castle of Cagliostro. We’re not talking about the horrible blight upon gaming that is cel-shading here. Bright colors, crisp lines, and clever animations make playing Critter Crunch easy on the eyes. Cute cutscenes in between segments of the game’s Adventure mode track the exploits of a ridiculous, skydiving zoologist who has come to the island to study Biggs and its efforts to maintain the food chain while keeping its own family fed. This mode occurs on a world map reminiscent of other PSN titles such as PixelJunk Monsters (minus the optional paths for more advanced players).

At the bottom of the chain we’ve got a bunch of flies, which Biggs feeds to a number of froglike critters of yellow and red. These can then be fed to larger, furry critters of pink and purple. Feeding two smaller animals to the proper predator causes the larger animal to pop, chaining tile elimination to any identical critter directly connected to the popping animal. Two other feeding procedures are possible: half-filling and food-chaining. If the player feeds one fly to a froglike critter, then the half-full froglike can then be fed to the larger purple and pink fuzzies to instantly pop them. And if a froglike with a fuzzy behind it naturally descends toward Biggs as the field fills, the player can just feed a fly to the froglike to cause a food-chain eliminating all three.

Soon more critters join the fray, such as a bomb who can devour two of anything before destroying all the tiles around it. Later levels add “blockers,” “extinctors,” and “toxics” to the mix (and you can guess what those do). There are also power-ups--such as watermelon seeds that can be machine-gunned off for quick stage clearing--derived from popping shining critters. Popping critters unleashes multicolored gems, which are the favored food of the Biggs species (and how you score points).

The greatest challenge provided by Adventure mode comes from the desire to feed one of the Biggs babies per level. In order to make one of these to appear, the player has to destroy eight of one critter in a single chain. When the baby appears, Biggs must run over to it and hold down the circle button to feed it with... rainbow vomit. Just watching this happen is a joy; it becomes even more exciting when the descending rows of critters accelerate toward the bottom, drawn by the alluring scent of iridescent regurgitant. Feeding the Biggs family is even more difficult on certain levels where the local fauna is limited to only a few species, making it more of a task to figure out how to pop eight of the same critter at once.

Aping later iterations of the Bejeweled series, Critter Crunch also contains Puzzle, Challenge, and Survival modes (unlocked in that order through playing Adventure). Puzzle requires the player to clear all the critters from a level in a certain small number of moves. Challenge requires a similarly clear level, replacing the move limit with one of time. Survival, like all survival modes, asks the player to keep playing until they get overwhelmed by waves of critters. There's also built-in support for cooperative and versus two-player shenanigans.

Critter Crunch is family friendly. The most challenging bits, such as feeding Biggs babies and puzzle challenges, are entirely optional. Because of the size of each critter, there are never too many tiles in the field at any given time. Sometimes the screen is limited to three columns, sometimes seven or eight. But the shallow vertical depth of the field and slow descending action mean that the chances for scoring massive chains are lower here than in some tile games. You’re probably not going to be seeing YouTube videos of expertly-constructed Critter Crunch chain reactions; if that’s your sole puzzling pleasure, you’d be better off honing your Puzzle Fighter skills or learning how manipulate Master grids in Hexic. Capybara has made the decision to buy their game quite easy for you: it costs $6.99 on PSN.

The Good: Brilliant visual style with cutesy animations, complex tile interactions, multiple modes of play, and two-player options.

The Bad: Maybe a few too many different types of critters, and too shallow a vertical level depth, to rip sweet million-point combos (really, this isn't actually a bad thing).

The Ugly: This game costs around seven dollars, but it's worth at least twice as much. Don't you people want to eat something other than ramen, Capybara?

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Playthrough: Spent a total of seven hours with the game, playing all modes for at least one hour.

Disclosure: Download of the full game provided for review by Capybara.