''Chuchel'' () is a 2018 video game developed by

Amanita Design Amanita Design is a Czech independent video game developing company founded in 2003 by Jakub Dvorský and headquartered in Brno, Czech Republic. The company has created award-winning games including ''Machinarium'', the ''Samorost'' series and ...

Story

The game follows the protagonist Chuchel, a

Dust Dust is made of fine particles of solid matter. On Earth, it generally consists of particles in the atmosphere that come from various sources such as soil lifted by wind (an aeolian process), volcanic eruptions, and pollution. Dust in homes ...

-style creature, as he tries to retrieve a cherry stolen by a giant one early morning, with his all-in-one best friend, enemy and pet Kekel either helping or hindering him on the way. The game is structured into short, loosely connected episodes of Chuchel's struggles to retrieve and keep the cherry; the episodic nature is emphasized by some levels showing the title. In the last level, it is revealed that the giant hand teasing Chuchel with the cherry is in fact a larger Chuchel-style creature named Chrchel; it swallows Chuchel and Kekel who retrieve the cherry from its stomach, and climb up to its brain to switch it from "grumpy" to "happy". The now-happy giant then delivers Chuchel and Kekel back to their home, where they finally split and eat the cherry, only to get a huge pile brought by the giant, who then starts chasing a large pear carried by an even larger hand.

Gameplay

The game consists of 30 levels. The player controls the eponymous Chuchel whose task is to retrieve a

cherry A cherry is the fruit of many plants of the genus ''Prunus'', and is a fleshy drupe (stone fruit). Commercial cherries are obtained from cultivars of several species, such as the sweet ''Prunus avium'' and the sour ''Prunus cerasus''. The nam ...

. Levels are different and most of them are played as

point-and-click adventure An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...

but some consist of minigames including spoofs of ''

Pac-Man originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. Th ...

'', ''

Flappy Bird ''Flappy Bird'' is a mobile game developed by the Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen ( vi, Nguyễn Hà Đông), under his game development company .Gears. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attemp ...

'', ''

Tetris ''Tetris'' (russian: link=no, Тетрис) is a puzzle video game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the approp ...

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Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed to the Midway division of Bally for overseas distribution. ''Space Invaders'' was the first fixed shooter and set ...

'', ''Donkey Kong'' and

Super Mario Bros. is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The successor to the 1983 arcade game ''Mario Bros.'' and the first game in the ''Super Mario'' series, it was first released in 1985 for th ...

When Chuchel retrieves the Cherry, antagonist Chrchel shows up and steals it. Chuchel is aided by his pet Kekel who helps him to get the Cherry.

Development

The game was developed by

. Designer Jaromír Plachý started to work on the game after he finished Botanicula in 2012. Plachý stated that he wanted to make an interactive cartoon with funny animation. He came up with the character of Chuchel (the word "chuchel" does not "officially" exist, but it's an apparent combination of two similar Czech words "chumel" (clamp or tangle) and "chuchvalec" (tangled mass or clot)) when he decided to draw the first thing that comes to his mind. Plachý then designed environments and turned them into actual levels. On December 20, 2018,

released an update for the game changing Chuchel's body color to orange, in response to the character being interpreted by some reactions as a racist stereotype called

Blackface Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by non-Black people to portray a caricature of a Black person. In the United States, the practice became common during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of racial stereo ...

. Some levels were also slightly changed to match Chuchel's new colour.

Reception

''Chuchel'' received generally positive reviews from critics. It holds 81/100 on

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

. On review aggregate ''

OpenCritic OpenCritic is a review aggregation website for video games. OpenCritic lists reviews from critics across multiple video game publications for the games listed on the site. The website then generates a numeric score by averaging all of the numeric ...

'', ''Chuchel'' had an average 80 out of 100 review score with 67% approval rating based on 20 reviews.

Accolades

References

* Keyes, Rob (January 3, 2019). "2018 New York Game Awards Nominees Reveale
Revdl
. Screen Rant. Retrieved January 7, 2019.

External links

* {{Portal bar, Video games 2018 video games Adventure games Amanita Design games Android (operating system) games Art games Flash games Indie games IOS games Point-and-click adventure games Video games developed in the Czech Republic Windows games Single-player video games Video game controversies Independent Games Festival winners