Penguin Patrol (DSi)

There’s a certain type of puzzle found in quite a few video games that could almost be described as a maze with no walls where you still need to discover the only path forward. In it, a group of tiles will be placed together and you can walk across each one only once, the player needing to find the path that touches all of the tiles without any repetition. Some games contextualize this in the form of squares of thin ice, the ice breaking after you step over it so you can’t retread the same tile even if you wanted to. The DSiware game Penguin Patrol decided to take these little puzzles that briefly show up in other games and build a whole experience around them, betting pretty hard on its ability to construct a good set of these challenges with only the single gameplay format.

Penguin Patrol begins with a large walrus in a cool pair of shades snatching up a bunch of penguins in a sack, a heroic young human chasing after in the hopes of saving them from this sudden kidnapping. Luckily for him many of the penguins have fallen out of the sack during the walrus’s escape, but now many of them are stranded on thin ice and instead need to be rescued from that. In a normal level, the player will head out across a sheet of ice that spans the top and bottom screens of the DS, the exact shape of the frozen water changing from level to level and requiring the player to figure out how they can safely cross the ice, collect the penguins, and make it to the level goal with each ice tile shattering once they step off of it. There is no time pressure in Penguin Patrol though, the player able to plan out their route as they please and a very generous undo function allows you to reverse every single action one by one even all the way back to the beginning of the level meaning you are free to experiment with your planned paths. By not extracting any toll from the player for this feature you can focus much more on the actual substance of the puzzles and since the action only progresses when you take an action, this can make for a fine game to whip out for a bit and play with no pressure if you need to put it down and return later.

In every level of Penguin Patrol your actual main focus will be on collecting the penguins, each level having a set amount you need to pick up that is usually only a few penguins short of the total present. This gives you a small degree of flexibility in harder levels but doesn’t trivialize them since you still need to find a way to grab most of them without running out of ground to walk on, but each level does have a three star scoring system in play as well. Clearing the level always grants you one star, but if you’re able to grab all the penguins and shatter all the ice tiles as well you can earn the full three. While trying to find the perfect path is an interesting challenge, when levels do get more complicated or different penguin types are introduced you might reach a point where you’d prefer to simply clear a level and move onto new ideas, and since the game’s bonus levels are simply unlocked by beating the story stages there also isn’t any real issue with choosing the incomplete level solution over one that fulfills every goal. Also of note though is how even if you are going for the perfect sweep of a stage there can be multiple ways to do so, some laying out the ice tiles in a way where it can only be finished in the prescribed manner but others giving you more wiggle room in how you can approach small segments. They will still require figuring out and the solutions often only differ in small ways, but this does allow levels to sometimes have more open designs instead of the layout of the ice suggesting solutions when it’s too constrained.

Admittedly though, the thin ice walking challenge isn’t one that has much longevity inherently. There are tiles in the game that aren’t thin ice like the barriers that help shape where you can traverse, open water that can already exist even before the ice shatters, and patches of safe ground that won’t break after walking over them, but it’s still a small series of maze-like challenges and since the penguins are sitting on the ice tiles, collecting them would inevitably be part of trying to clear every square. Penguin Patrol thankfully realizes the monotony that would set in if it stuck with these basic designs for too long and begins to introduce a few more ideas into the action. One comes in the form of more durable ice tiles that can be crossed twice before shattering, this adding the idea of doubling back on an earlier area that can reshape the pathing options available to you. Similarly, there are also patches of indestructible ice, but these instead are slippery and the player will be forced to move across them until they collide with something or reach a patch of normal ground or ice. Sometimes these are hazards as dropping in water will leave you unable to finish the level but others make their own little maze where you need to find the way to slip around safely to grab the stranded penguins, this also an adaptation of a fairly common ice puzzle concept found in other games but a solid fit for a game where path charting is the main challenge.

The different penguin types are certainly the best complication though. The default blue penguins stand in place waiting for rescue, but soon you’ll encounter a yellow type that will run when you get close, the player needing to find a way to intercept their path before they accidentally wander into any water. Since the game’s action only moves when you make a move and the grid-based level design has everything progress a single square at a time these yellow penguins are still challenges you can tackle at your own pace, but this game based around predictive pathing is a solid fit for a more mobile pressure to that planning. Fatty penguins are big birds that still fill a single square but must be pushed to the level goal, the player needing to make sure they don’t trap them in a way where they can’t be pushed to the level exit. The last iteration comes in the form of little pink bratty penguins who demand a specific toy before they’ll let you pick them up, adding a bit of prioritizing to how you grab things on the ice other than just trying to hit every tile. The introduction of these mildly more complex penguins is probably where the game best benefits from the option to complete a level without every penguin as the right path does start to become more set in stone and figuring it out can take a fair bit if you don’t have a natural knack for it. However, this is the kind of advancement in design needed to stave off the tedium of the puzzle type, the variation still not quite elevating it as it is easy to settle into these new penguin and tile types quite quickly but still providing a decent set of variables in the story’s 59 levels.

After the story’s finale though, the 18 bonus levels you unlock do have one more gimmick left to introduce, that being stages with multiple exits. Since these bonus levels are based around fatty penguins who must be pushed to level exits it becomes about getting them all to one while still making sure you have a way to exit yourself and this actually feels like the most drastic change to the formula yet, one that definitely gets more difficult as well since tile navigation becomes much stricter when you can lock off the pushing paths with one wrong turn. Dabbling in more ideas that change the fundamentals of play like this could have kept the whole adventure feeling more fresh, but Penguin Patrol is probably going for the idea that someone who likes the normal format of this puzzle type might be looking for more stages to play it in rather than ones that break away from the core concept significantly.

THE VERDICT: Penguin Patrol is a cute and relaxed little puzzler that chose one format for its puzzles and stuck to it, and while it concocts some ways to vary up how you plan to cross its thin ice patches, it never really reaches for the stars with any of its concepts. The leniency does make it a good puzzle game to pick up and play for a short period and the three star system provides an incentive to plan your path through a stage perfectly while giving the room to finish a level with the bare minimum if you’re struggling. The different penguin types and a few special tile variations keep Penguin Patrol from going stale, but the bonus levels feel like the only ones with a potentially bold new direction as the others are mild complications to plotting your course through the maze-like stages. The new variables keep things fresh until you finish the levels at least, so if Penguin Patrol’s puzzle type clicks with you it at least won’t grow dull during the time you spend with it.

And so, I give Penguin Patrol for Nintendo DSi…

An OKAY rating. For a game that costs 2 dollars on the Nintendo eShop it’s probably little surprise it just tried to provide a decent set of stages within its puzzle format. It’s almost like how some games simply bank on providing a group of crosswords, word searches, or sudokus for their interested audience, the idea not being to shake up the design too much but to supply more of what someone already likes. The specific tile puzzle featured here is more of a video game puzzle than those examples that have real world equivalents and it is more common for video game design to emphasize variance though, and in a way Penguin Patrol does that fine enough. The different penguin and tile types are suitable complications that don’t shake up the core format so someone who does just want to test their abilities in this tile-crossing puzzle type likely won’t begrudge their addition. The slippery ice tiles and the multiple exit bonus levels do show promise for breaking from the core concepts some without dispensing with the focus on planning pathways through a stage, so it could have been interesting to see the game pursue them further, perhaps still relegating them to bonus levels if they were worried the changes might be too radical.

Penguin Patrol is a relaxing little game still, one with a single backing track that is lovely albeit repetitive and an art style that makes things cute while fitting with the low pressure approach to play. Having the option to always undo anything you’ve done no matter how far back in the stage it was is a wise way of making this game accessible and the designs can be a little more complex because you are forgiven if you don’t think incredibly far ahead. The grid design does mean there is only so much space thankfully so it never gets too absurd in how much planning it demands of you. It can be nice to have this very specific puzzle format available outside of finding particular portions of a larger and more varied gaming experience to play, but much like a normal maze with walls its appeal only lasts so long before it becomes rote. Penguin Patrol has some ideas to prevent that repetitiveness from setting in too strongly, but don’t expect much more than lightly varied thin ice puzzles if you do go and get this budget DSiware game.