Squish and the Corrupted Crystal

My first instinct with Squish and the Corrupted Crystal was optimism. A speedy sidescroller built around form-switching abilities, crystal collection, and time trials sounds like a solid weekend pick-up, and the bones of the concept are legitimately interesting. Boss encounters unlock new color-coded crystal armors for Squish, each with a distinct traversal ability - the blue form lets you liquefy and slip through grids, and later forms add further twists that keep the moment-to-moment movement from going stale. The structure is also reasonable: a world map, over 50 levels across 5 distinct worlds, with each stage gated by a crystal quota that rewards thorough play rather than rushing. For a debut title from Cheat Code Studios, there is clearly an idea worth playing here. The problem is that the execution repeatedly undermines the idea. The jump input is inconsistent - the distance and height you get out of a sprint-jump shifts between attempts in ways that feel random rather than skill-based. Sprint is mapped to the left bumper on controller and was not bound to keyboard at all at launch, which is an odd default for a game that leans heavily on speed. Key rebinding exists but shipped with a bug that could leave you with duplicate button assignments. None of these are small papercuts. In a platformer, control fidelity is everything, and when the jump does not respond the same way twice, deaths stop feeling earned and start feeling arbitrary. Level design compounds the friction. Checkpoints, which did receive post-launch revisions, occasionally drop you past a crystal you need to unlock a barrier ahead of you - so you respawn and are immediately stuck, forced to restart. The spike-surface sections are genuinely punishing in a way that reads less like designed challenge and more like an oversight about how imprecise the movement feels at speed. Shorter levels help limit the damage, but "short" stops being a positive when you are replaying them because of input failures rather than genuine mistakes. The time trial objectives do add replay value for players willing to push through the core frustrations, and the achievment list even has a "die at least 100 times" award, which tells you exactly how the developer expected players to experience this. Visually the game is colorful and readable, which matters more than people admit in fast platformers. The aesthetic is simple - sparse character detail, plain textures - but the tradeoff is a clean silhouette against backgrounds, and you can always tell where Squish is. The form-switching concept, when the controls cooperate, genuinely produces fun moments: blasting through a level at speed, ducking into liquid form to slide through a grate, then resuming the sprint. Those moments exist. They are just surrounded by too much noise to call this a comfortable recommendation for most players. If you burned through every Super Mario Bros. and Sonic game you could find and are looking for a budget indie to scratch that itch, Squish has enough raw ideas to hold interest for a few hours. Everyone else should know what they are signing up for: a first-game roughness that the developer patched at but never fully resolved.

Alex · Scout Team

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