Grab the Bottle (PS4)

If there’s one thing Grab the Bottle excels at, it’s making the player realize just how important bottles are in a person’s life. From the nourishing milk bottles of infancy to the sweet sodas craved by children, the bottles of beer adults find comfort in to the bottle of pills they’ll need to stay alive in their sunset years, a regular person always seems to find bottles entering their life in one way or another. While Grab the Bottle does seem to stretch what can count as a bottle a bit with things like thermoses and cans of hair spray, these all-important containers still justify our protagonist’s dogged persistence in getting them no matter what stands in his way.

Grab the Bottle takes place over the course of one man’s life, but his desire to acquire bottles finds assistance in his one incredible ability, that being the power to stretch his arms as far as they’d ever need to go to grab the drinks that are otherwise out of his reach. Any time he needs a bottle he’ll find a way to get it, the game’s levels built around not just being puzzles his extending arm must navigate carefully, but ones built out of the kind of locations and situations he finds himself in. The player is asked to weave his absurdly stretchy limb around areas like a carnival, a movie theater, across the dance floor, and through treehouses, although there are more normal locations like the rooms of his various living spaces as he matures as well as stranger places to find beverages like in the sewer. The game uses a comic book art style to both wordlessly tell its story and create its levels, the stages having a dotted background like old comics while still having distinctly solid objects of interest that take advantage of the area’s concept to design the obstacles and interactive objects.

The gameplay goal of every stage is to grab whatever bottle’s caught the protagonist’s eye this time around, his arm extending out automatically as it greedily searches for its quarry. The player decides how to guide the arm, bending it around since any time it touches a part of the environment that isn’t an interactive object, it will be hurt and lurch back, the arm only able to get hurt three times before the level will restart. If you do fail a stage enough times you will eventually be offered some mercy power-ups like one that tells you what order to deal with a stage’s hazards and items or one that makes you invulnerable so you don’t have to worry about your arm’s health, but there’s a few issues with this assistance system. One is that it doesn’t always seem to be available in a stage with no indication as to what kind of stage won’t have it, although this might be an extension of another glitch where sometimes the menus just stop working properly, meaning you can’t pick these power-ups until a full game reset has been done to correct it. The problems with power-up selection seem to be the only major glitches in the game at least, so the core play at least gets to be judged on its own merits.

In some ways, each level can be thought of like a maze, the arm needing to find the right path to move through it to get to the bottle. Since your arm is constantly stretching, it too becomes an obstacle that might potentially block paths or hurt your hand as its mass begins to occupy space in the stage, so when a level is about to begin, it’s good to survey the area to get a feel for how you’ll need to snake your way through the layout. Getting to the bottle is rarely as easy as just worming your way to it though, especially since most stages first require you to pick up a set amount of other items before the bottle is available. Some stages even get creative with it, like needing to cook all the meats on a barbecue before grabbing your drink or needing to score well enough at a water balloon throwing carnival game to earn your bottle prize. Some of these like precisely detonating bombs are difficult to execute due your limited level of control, but the different goals generally make things more interesting. On top of this extra consideration, you will often have to set up the environment so you can get to every object, doing things like breaking barriers, opening hatches or doors, or using items you can pick up to trigger changes to the stage layout. Your arm only ever moves forward on its own, but by grabbing certain items laying around, it will slowly start to retract. You can speed up your arm movement in either direction, but this method of going backwards means you need to approach usable items the right way to get them to the right place while also being able to use these tools as a way of backtracking through a stage to snake your way through in a different manner.

While most levels focus on puzzle-solving, there are a few stages in Grab the Bottle where you are instead trying to swipe a bottle from a fleeing creature, things like a magpie or sewer gator ending up carrying your coveted containers away from you. These action segments are more about finding the right path to survive the the chase than doing any puzzle solving, and unfortunately, they are probably weaker for it. Besides issues like some lag during segments of the magpie chase, the other big hurdle to enjoying them is that a single hit will end your run here, and since you can’t see too far ahead, a lot of trial and error is necessary to learn the paths you need to take, especially since hazards like balloons and flying birds are triggered by where your hand is rather than being a consistently timed factor you can work around. Most normal levels are small in scope so there are only a few factors to consider per stage, but the chase segments are fairly long and a failure resets them entirely. The power-ups aren’t too much help, especially since invulnerability doesn’t really work here, but it will at least slow things down some, although that still doesn’t mean the triggered hazards will activate in a reliable manner.

Were these chase segments the only quibble to be had with Grab the Bottle, it would still be a fairly decent title. However, there is something wrong with the level design that can be traced back to how your arm moves. The automatic movement of your lengthy limb will prove to be a constant source of trouble, especially since your movement of it involves angling it around rather than doing something simpler and more precise like drawing a path for it. Grab the Bottle expects a surprising amount of perfection from the player at times, featuring many tight spaces where the hand will only barely fit through, and that’s only if your approach is right. There are many tight spaces where extending your arm in a straight line will be a challenge, and to make matters worse, sometimes you’ll need to double back through a tight space, meaning that if you didn’t position your arm right on the first pass, when you turn back to go through it again there might be no space left. The only way to retract your arm it to restart a level or find grabbable objects, and both of these options have flaws. Grabbable objects often have a set purpose so you can’t afford to move them to where they don’t belong, and restarting a level means all your work so far is undone and you must once again fiddle with the precise movement requirements to succeed. Speeding the limb up when replaying after a restart sounds like it would fix the repetition issues, but since precision is such a constant consideration, the player can’t often risk going at high speeds. On top of this, it can be difficult to read just how close you can get to an object. The hand might rigidly refuse to even brush the edge of a wall but then later it will be able to have an entire finger pass through a roller coaster’s wheel without being injured. The intelligent level design ends up wasted since too much of the focus ends up being on pressing the control stick properly to overcome the challenges, many puzzles possible to figure out well before the player can get the arm to cooperate on executing the solution.

THE VERDICT: The puzzle-solving in Grab the Bottle is right where it needs to be for its concept, plenty of challenging arrangements really getting the player to think about how they should move the constantly stretching arm to succeed. Unfortunately, too much focus is given to threading the needle with the infinitely growing arm, the challenging puzzle solving less enjoyable because of issues with controlling the unwieldy limb. In addition to the chase levels that put too much emphasis on learning through failure, Grab the Bottle is a game that looks good with its comic book art style and strong level design, but the arm’s movement makes trying to grab the bottles needlessly troublesome.

And so, I give Grab the Bottle for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. It’s easy to pinpoint where Grab the Bottle needs improvement. The movement of the arm is what feeds into the game’s issues, with certain small adjustments being all it would take to instantly flip this into a Good game. The level designs are challenging on their own without the need for confined spaces or tight gaps to navigate through, so widening things a touch could make things less finicky. Things requiring precise timing of movement like bomb throwing and the chase levels could be similarly adjusted to require less precision with the unreliable movement, or even just a little more leeway health-wise other than putting on the boxing glove for invincibility would let players feel their way around a level longer instead of repeatedly restarting for every small failure made. A better adjustment might just be to let the player fully control the arm’s forward movement. Backwards movement could still be restricted and chase scenes could still exist as a shake up of the formula, but if the player chose when to move forward, smartly moving the arm would be the clear emphasis rather than just nailing that precise angles needed to slip through parts of the level that aren’t challenging otherwise.

Grab the Bottle tried to engage the mind with its level layouts and the fingers with the need to move the arm just to solve the levels, but these end up being incompatible approaches due to the small margins for error. What could have been a fun and silly game is let down by an odd insistence on keeping the long limb moving properly, the focus on control only holding the player back from appreciating the challenges found in its maze-like level arrangements.