Elefunk (PS3)
When I was young, I played a game based on the cartoon Marsupilami wherein you need to set up a path for an elephant that moves on its own to safely navigate a level. The babysitting of an AI controlled character I had no control over was a bit too big of an ask for a young mind eager to explore levels or use Marsupilami’s powers for platforming and combat, so this game holds a bit of a sour spot in my memory. When I read the description for Elefunk on PS3, the idea of creating a path for an elephant that moves on its own made me dread that this could be similar in style to that old Sega Genesis game, but on playing it I was pleasantly surprised it had more in common with the Bridge Constructor series of games, the player first building a bridge that the elephant then wanders across at its own pace.
After a very simple sequence of images explaining how you’re trying to rescue a set of elephants a circus ringleader captured, you can dive into the game’s main mode: Puzzle. In most levels of Elefunk, an elephant or group of elephants will be positioned at a starting point waiting for you to do your construction work. All these elephants have one goal they wish to reach, be it across a chasm or at the bottom of a tower, with the player needing to use whatever tools are available to build a path the giant land mammals can safely traverse without it caving under their own weight. At first it can definitely be difficult to gauge how much weight an elephant exerts on your bridges, but this eventually becomes second nature because most of your equipment is specifically designed to carry the animal. When a level of Puzzle mode starts, you have a functionally unlimited amount of time to figure out how you want to build the bridges for your elephants, but doing so quickly will earn you bonus points for high scores. This time to figure out how you want to build is key to success as each level only gives you a select amount of pieces with which to do your construction work.
The types of available pieces remain rather humble throughout the adventure, the game providing simple struts, triangle pieces, boxes, and other shapes that are all good fits for typical bridge building. However, despite giving you all the tools someone familiar with the bridge construction genre would like to have, the game does little to explain important concepts like how triangles bear weight, the importance of trusses, and other key architectural information that can help novices get acclimated to the play style. A bit of experimentation can at least catch some players up to speed, but later levels do introduce ropes as well with very little info on how they affect the physics of your creations, so Elefunk certainly doesn’t shine when it comes to tutorials. Still, the piece distribution is handled extremely well for each level, the player needing to use parts wisely to succeed or else they’ll come up short and be outright unable to complete the stage. Experimentation is practically a part of the process, and having your work finally come together in way that lets the elephants reach their destinations is incredibly satisfying because of its tight requirements and dependence on truly understanding the forces at play.
Retrying a level can be a little clumsy though. If your bridge fails it will offer you the chance to rebuild it, but you can press select instead of start prior to the failure to bring up the restart menu if you already identify an issue you want to fix. You can thankfully speed up the elephant crossing segment and the animals always move in a reliable manner, so tweaking based on their reactions to the bridges is easy enough. However, getting a good camera angle isn’t always the easiest as the zooming in and out are tied to the control sticks and only move in set amounts, the camera sometimes resetting to its desired position when you do something like tell the elephants to start moving. If you really want to watch a specific segment of your bridge buckle and bend to understand what to fix it might take some fiddling with the camera to do so, but not having the perfect angle on this 2D game isn’t a dealbreaker or anything since most problems have pretty dramatic fallouts like the whole bridge collapsing. As expected of a bridge builder though the bridge will be back to how it was last when you go back to the editor. In a rather nice change from many bridge builders though, the game isn’t too concerned if the elephant breaks some of the structure as it crosses so long as it makes it to its destination without being jostled or falling over.
There’s more at play in Elefunk than the piece limiting system too. The game features 20 unique regular stages that are split into four locations. The Waterfall areas at the start have the track the elephant needs to cross already placed, the player only concerned with properly supporting it so it doesn’t crumble. This could almost be said to be acclimating you to how to place track for the later stages where there are no pre-built structures, but the second level already takes a wholly new approach to how you need to handle the elephants. Rather than walking across at a steady pace in the Desert, the elephants are now curled up into balls and drop down onto your structures, the player needing to ensure they safely roll into their goals without going over. What’s more, Desert levels also feature idols the elephants need to grab as they roll, preventing the player from taking any strange shortcuts based on the fact rolling physics could have been exploited to skip sections otherwise. Desert has a lot of pre-built structures as well, the focus still on puzzling out how to make the specific arrangement or pieces work.
Swamp brings in the idea of differing materials for your construction pieces. Wood and metal are naturally a different degree of durable, but the stages start to give you plenty more pieces as the tracks are now in your hands to place. Deciding where to place the tougher stuff to ensure stability versus where weaker wood can do the job becomes key to balancing your use of the assigned pieces, and the Circus at the end of the game pushes this further with the most challenging designs that mix together multiple elephants, limited places to connect your bridge to for support, and a set of pieces that seem numerous until you actually start building the bridges and learn you’ll need to identify which corners can be cut. Along the way other little hazards are added to the stages as well like mice you need to build around to avoid startling the crossing elephants, fish that will leap out and bite the large land mammals if you don’t build bridges high enough, and meerkats who leap up and down on structures to jeopardize their durability. All in all Elefunk’s 20 main levels are all well crafted bridge construction puzzles that always bring something new to the table either by how the pieces are distributed, built-in supports are positioned, or which gimmicks are included.
Beyond the main construction mode though there are still other ways to play Elefunk. As almost a palate cleanser after all the cerebral bridge building levels, each world ends with a rather straightforward bonus game about an elephant daredevil deciding to cross a canyon with a rocket bike instead of bridges. Physics still play a big role as you need to aim the launch ramp properly and apply the booster to gain the right amount of height and distance, and while the Sixaxis motion controls here feel a little gimmicky, this easy bonus game is a nice enough way to decompress after having to manage every joint and connection in the difficult bridge building sections.
Time Attack mode is the game’s other fully featured mode, recontextualizing all of the levels from Puzzle as timed challenges where you need to build the bridges in a limited amount of time to win. Some of the structures will already be placed for you though, meaning you have to fill in the gaps to make the pre-built bridges functional, and while this could have been an interesting challenge, this mode ends up a bit of a write off because of two factors. One is the fact that each time you play a stage, it randomizes which pieces are already in play, meaning you can’t reliably try to build a structure even after you fail. What’s more, retrying after a failure causes this piece randomization to occur, so you can’t test small segments of your bridge or learn through your mistakes in this mode. It can still put up a good fight for players really into the genre, but its unforgiving design in a game that already struggles to teach the player its basics means most players are better off ignoring it.
On the other hand, multiplayer is so accessible you don’t even need to understand bridge building to participate. Multiplayer features five levels unique to the mode where the elephant-bearing structure has already been built, but rather than these being bridges that help elephants cross gaps, these are meant to house the elephants safely. In multiplayer, players take turns removing a piece of the large structure, and if the elephants inside should be sent tumbling from their safe perches, the player responsible loses the round. This Jenga-inspired gameplay mode can be played better by someone with an understanding of the physics involved of course, and the symmetrical nature of many of the builds means you can often mirror an opponent’s move in the early game, but the structures are just complex enough that you can really wear them down to barely anything with the right picks at the right time but can also send it crumbling down with a misguided choice. More levels with more ambitious designs would definitely spice up this mode some, but it still can provide a bit of fun even for players uninterested in the puzzle-focused single-player modes.
THE VERDICT: While it doesn’t do the best job introducing its bridge-building mechanics and Time Attack mode is too unforgiving for its own good, Elefunk’s other gameplay offerings are surprisingly fun and challenging. The multiplayer mode’s Jenga-like construction is accessible to all types and the bonus levels are a bit of levity between Puzzle mode’s tough but satisfying building challenges. The limited piece availability requires a good degree of planning to utilize, each victory feeling well-earned since you had to puzzle out the physics interactions yourself. The new concerns like animal hazards and different considerations like the use of ropes or having the elephants roll downhill keep adding new variables, the game’s twenty levels feeling like they manage to remain difficult but exciting to complete because of how well they balance that challenge.
And so, I give Elefunk for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. While definitely a bit rough as your first foray into the niche genre of physics puzzlers known as bridge construction, Elefunk is still an enjoyable member of it because it works wonderfully once you’ve learned the ropes. Outside of the introductory stages, levels require a good degree of thought to complete, the layout, available pieces, and dangers all asking for more than just building the best bridge to cross a simple gap. You can’t have your elephant nipped by piranhas at one point only or the very different challenge of having the rolling elephant grab idols ask for a very different bridge building tactic, and while these variables always change how you’ll approach your construction plans for a level, the game never gets so complicated or bogged down in building considerations it becomes frustrating. Perhaps the most unfortunate thing is that Time Attack is a good mode concept but is made a bit too difficult by not allowing for experimentation or adjustments, the all-or-nothing bridge building making it unfriendly even to those familiar with the genre once you start hitting the later stages. Multiplayer’s concept is pretty strong though and almost the inverse of Time Attack when it comes to accessibility, but it definitely could have used some bulking up in the level count department just like how Puzzle mode could have used a more reasonable camera control system.
Regardless of some stumbling points and Time Attack’s flawed attempt to add a second mode to explore after Puzzle mode, Elefunk is still a very fun game within its genre and one that makes good use of its ideas to enhance the fundamental physics puzzles. I’m sure a younger me would find the game even more frustrating than Marsupilami specifically because of its weak tutorials and pure focus on physics puzzles, but as an older gamer I can appreciate the need to think carefully about my actions and understand the satisfaction of seeing a plan unfold successfully. Elefunk hits those notes quite well despite also being a game about making a safe path an elephant you don’t control can cross.