It seems that with every new puzzle game, the idea pool get’s more and more shallow. How many different ways can be left to tease our game addled brains? But the new and obscurely titled Xbox Live Arcade addition, Roogoo, grants itself a lot of extra breathing room in this increasingly crowded genre by testing the player’s spatial acuity, as much as powers of reasoning and observation.

Initial impressions lean heavily toward those toddler’s workbench toys, whereby kids are required to hammer colored shapes through the appropriate hole. Essentially, this is precisely what Roogoo is – or at least, where it begins. The important thing is not to dismiss the game too quickly based on the juvenile visage of its mechanics, since the sharp teeth of the gameplay bite quite hard.

There’s some semblance of a nonsensical back story to begin with, that harkens to games like Beautiful Katamari with the surrealist community of peaceful planets besieged by some kind of bizarre force. In this case it’s something to do with blocking valuable asteroids from landing on the planet Roogoo, or something. Even if you are paying attention, the peculiarity of it all leaves little in the way of coherent plot, but this is all quite irrelevant anyway. Puzzlers don’t need this kind of plot-based justification; least of all a reaction and dexterity focused one like Roogoo.
Basic, colored shapes fall from the top of the screen, and it’s your happy task to see that as many of them as possible arrive at the bottom. In between are a series of disk, with appropriately shaped holes in them at each compass point for the shapes to pass through. Rotating the disks so the shapes land in the correct hole is what forms the crux of the gameplay, and makes for an unexpectedly intense experience.

The distance between the disks varies, but is never so far apart that there’s any concern over waiting for the shapes to fall. Indeed, much of the time a bit of extra breathing room would help, but the use of the controller’s bumper buttons for rotation of the disks adds precious micro-seconds to your reaction times. Pressing the A button speeds up the decent of the falling shapes, though it seems there’s seldom much opportunity to make considerable use of that feature – despite the ever ticking clock pushing you to get the shapes home.

The extreme simplicity of Roogoo’s gameplay means it can ramp up the difficult setting quite early on, as the first level (two at the most) teaches the essential requirements of play almost immediately. The 45 levels add quirks to the basic methods of gameplay, however, that ensure any dangers of repetitiveness are kept at bay. For instance, single shapes won’t pass through certain disks lower down in the chain; requiring the weight of a few more cubes, cylinders and stars to push them through to the next level.

On occasion, butterflies will pick up a shape from the growing pile at the bottom and begin carrying it up again; essentially requiring you play the game in reverse so as not to lose the item over the side. At other times, nefarious ‘Meemoos’ will block the holes, and only shift out of the way when a fast moving shape (propelled by the A button) clonks it on the head. Subtle, but necessary tweaks to the game that keep it from becoming too one-dimensional.

Intelligent and lucid designs make Roogoo easy to grasp and keeps the reaction test mechanics at the forefront, while the subtle changes in speed, height and obstacles from level to level keeps the challenges well balanced. It can become a little irritating on the levels when fingers and brain suffer brief dislocation, and it’s very easy to give it up as a bad job early on in levels when nothing seems to line up. But Tetris and Neves fans, and people who like a good, intense dexterous challenge, will undoubtedly persevere to the end of the 45 levels, and feel good about getting there.

Ignore the infantile visage and resist the occasionally creeping frustration on levels that refuse to play nice, and Roogoo will reward Xbox Live Arcade gamers with more than a couple of hours of clean, escapist entertainment.