There is one PSP game in everyone's mind here at the Game Developer's Conference: it's called Crush. Kuju Entertainment's revolutionary puzzle-platformer was highlighted in an experimental games panel, due to its highly innovative gameplay concept.
One of the greatest challenges of creating such a unique project is trying to predict how the player will respond to it. Will they be able to understand how the gameplay works? Will they get too confused? Stuck? Through endless hours of QA & debugging, the team decided that the game has to explain to the player why one failed: it becomes a learning process, rather than a frustrating, alienating one.
Although Crush hasn't been released yet, Kuju's Alex Butterfield wasn't afraid to think of other possibilities to expand the Crush idea: What if you could crush time? (For example, a block could turn into a bridge; a cockroach into a centipede.) What if you could crush multiple realities, in multiplayer? Would each player have their own reality? The questions become far more challenging to answer, but much more exciting at the same time. Hopefully, Crush will meet an appreciative audience when it debuts on the PSP--I'd love to see a sequel that explores these mind-numbing concepts.
