Kickle Cubicle (NES) Playthrough
184A playthrough of Irem's 1990 action-puzzle game for the NES, Kickle Cubicle.
This playthrough includes both the regular stages and the 30 stage "Special Game" of harder puzzles that becomes available after finishing the standard game. The special game begins at 1:07:12.
Kickle Cubicle is an adaptation of an arcade puzzler, and though Irem was known far better for their shooters, this addictive time-sink nicely reaffirms that they were much more than just "the guys that made R-Type."
A wizard king has decided that he doesn't want to play nicely, and so he coats the kingdom in a layer of ice and installs his own henchman in the palaces across the land.
Kickle, rocking a pair of snazzy red earmuffs, has to visit and liberate each of the four themed areas of the kingdom. Each level occupies a single screen, and to destroy the ice, Kickle has to collect all of the "dream bags" laying about. I thought they were volcanoes as a kid. Or spoilt flan. I could never quite decide which they looked more like.
In most cases, it takes some work to get all of the bags. Kickle can freeze enemies with his breath to create ice bridges, place pegs in the ice to stop blocks that are flying about, and later on, he can send blocks flying into contraptions like springs and hammers to direct where they end up.
Similar to how the Lolo games are structured, the first couple of islands ease you into the mechanics gently, but once it has finished introducing the different gameplay elements, the gloves come off. These puzzles become outright devious!
There are a lot of them, too. If you still haven't had your fill by the time you whack the Wizard King, thirty more bonus puzzles await anyone seeking a bigger challenge, and they're full of clever and unexpected twists on the mechanics.
Kickle Cubicle has a super cutesy look to it, but the graphics are all clean and make it easy to take everything in at a quick glance, and I loved the game's goofy style and personality. Everything wears a funny facial expression, and the cutscenes with things like shoes and tomatoes give off a lovably corny vibe that reminded me a lot of Princess Tomato. That music is also hyper memorable. There isn't much of it, but I never tired of it while I was playing, and I was still humming the main theme days after finishing it.
If you want a puzzler that'll make you think, Kickle Cubicle is pretty ideal - it's one of the best games of its type on the NES.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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