Pushover Review (gopher)
First, just a tip for anyone playing - F1 brings up the table identifying the types of dominos! Little known these days, but back in the 90s, on PCs, F1 was pretty universal for "help."
This is a game I'd fondly remembered from the early 90s. Full disclosure, when I played it at the time, I got it at a lan party, so nearly 30 years later, I've paid for the game for the first time... I was an American teenager who had no idea what "Quavers" were, and if not for the game's story, I never would've suspected this was a product placement tie-in.
Some notes first: This is the original DOS version of the game, running emulated with dosbox. Despite what the Steam description says - which describes the SNES version that had it's Quavers branding stripped and the story replaced, this is in fact the original, branded version, where the story is that you're descending the anthill to rescue packets of snack food.
Hadn't seen, or even thought of, this game in over 20 years, went googling to try and even remember the name of it, and was shocked to find it was on Steam. Bought a copy - figured even if I didn't play it, just seemed right to actually pay for, however belatedly. Gave it a try though, and wow, pleasant surprise, it holds up great! I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but for an early 90s puzzle game, the levels do a pretty solid job of introducing the game's various mechanics, which have a surprising amount of subtlety and interactions.
The game itself is a puzzle game, where the object is to reorganize some arrangement of dominos so that a single push will knock them all down. Making this tricky is that there are around a dozen different types of dominos - dominos that explode (making holes for others to fall through), dominos that split in two and go both ways, dominos that float up to the ceiling before falling, dominos that make bridges across gaps... the early levels introduce each of these, while also being set up to demonstrate some of the interactions and other mechanics. Generally you can pick up and move any of these dominos, except for one special domino on each level that must be knocked over last, in order to open the exit to the next level.
Only three things I don't love about this game on replaying today. First, for some reason they decided to impose a time limit on each level. This isn't as bad as it sounds - you can take all the time you want, but if you don't knock over the last domino before time's up, the door won't open, so you'll have to restart and do it again. Still, a bit annoying and seemingly pointless. :edit: After playing more, I'd forgotten the extent to which this is an *action* puzzle game, so the timer makes more sense than I was initially thinking. Still wish it didn't start until I moved, but ah well.
Second, escape brings up the pause menu, where you can restart the level, exit to the menu, or spend a token to cheat if you're stuck. Fine, good, except - if there's a way to CLOSE that menu without picking any of those choices, I've not figured it out! And third, and perhaps most annoying - there's no save feature.
Third, this game was made originally for platforms where it was not a given that there would be a hard drive or any other way to save games - the Amiga *supported* them but not everyone had one - but even in the early 90s, the DOS port not at least remembering which level you'd last played (all of 1 byte of storage) seemed a bit lame. There's a file with the level codes for the first 67 levels, called PUSHCODE.TXT, installed with the game. For convenience I've reposted this to the to a discussion thread for the game on steam, and if I get past level 67, I'll try to remember to update it with the rest...
I can't remember for sure, it's been so long, but I think I actually got stuck at some point as a kid, so not sure if I ever finished all 100 levels. Not sure at this point what the difficulty curve is like or how fiendish it will become, will have to see...