Ketzal’s Corridors (3DS)

Conceiving of a practical use for the 3DS’s glasses-free 3D in a game proved to be a difficult task few games took up, but even if 3D wasn’t required for certain games, there were definitely concepts that suited it. The Wiiware game ThruSpace had a surprisingly fitting concept, the player guiding shapes through small openings in walls that they were constantly flying towards. The emphasis on the shape of the object and the importance of visual depth to the play meant 3D would at least be a good match for it even if it didn’t confer many advantages to have it enabled, so a sequel was developed with a more distinct art style than featureless blocks in barely decorated corridors. Ketzal’s Corridors, also known as SpeedThru: Potzol’s Puzzle in Europe, would still be about lining up shapes with holes in the wall, but a Mesoamerican theme gives the title a bit more life as an action puzzler.

 

Due to the name differences in regions, the small bit of story present in the game differs slightly, mostly in regards to the names for characters. In the world of Ketzal’s Corridors and SpeedThru: Potzol’s Puzzle, a benevolent god of creation known either as Ketzal or Creatl was attacked by a god of destruction known either as Koruptal or Kaotl, the evil god shattering the world into separate islands and scattering the many hearts of Ketzal across the shrines he created. The servant of Ketzal, known as Xoto in the U.S. but being the titular Potzol in European countries, tries to rise up with the help of the block-shaped guardians and stop Koruptal, but the dark god is too powerful and casts him and the guardians away. Once they’ve had time to recover though, Xoto realizes that the hearts can power them up while Ketzal’s shrines can train them for the confrontation with Koruptal, the journey to save the god of creation beginning from there. The story plays a minimal part in the adventure beyond helping to root the art style’s appearance in some form of fictitious Mesoamerican mythology, but the character and background design do give the game a bit more flavor than just doing a more advanced version of trying to fit the right shapes into the right holes over and over. There is only one boss at the end being the fight with Koruptal and it’s actually fairly easy compared to levels you’ll play before it and in terms of enemies they are mostly moving tiles with faces on them that block your path without injuring you so the context for the journey doesn’t impact things much, the focus on the fast flying action at the game’s heart.

Depending on which island you’re tackling or which specific challenge level you have entered, you’ll be controlling guardians with differently shaped bodies. While essentially these are just blocks with faces and patterns carved into them since they can’t talk or really move beyond floating about and twisting through the air, the exact shape each guardian takes will impact the difficulty of the game’s corridor-like levels. Flying forward happens on its own so the player has to try and line up their guardian with any holes in the upcoming wall so they can slip through, a crash with a wall ending the level immediately. There is a small grace period when you’re close to the wall where time will slow down some if you only need a small and quick adjustment, but in harder levels this is barely a factor. To line up your shape with the wall’s hole you can move it about the air, spin it to the left or right, and turn it up and down. You are also able to rotate it to the right 90 degrees with the R button, but oddly enough you can’t rotate it left since the L button is devoted to the very vital speed up option that becomes key to finishing the levels with tight time limits. The exact shape of your guardian piece will be the main determinant for how difficult things will be, the game starting you of with a three block piece shaped like a corner that is pretty easy to spin into a position that will easily pass through holes. Later on you’ll start to get a block shaped like a T that is also pretty simple to orient into a shape that will slip through most walls without trouble, but the final island as well as a few challenge levels will give you guardians with shapes that will require more active rotating and spinning to pass through the holes properly.

 

With the corner and T block guardians you can shift them to essentially be a two block tall line you can rotate to slip through every wall ahead while the harder ones will be more awkward three or four block shapes that require more attention to slip through since they aren’t just one simple line, but the game also has special levels where the goal is to perfectly match a symbol on the wall to succeed so some awareness of the guardian’s 3D shape is necessary to clear those mostly optional challenges. The truth of the matter is to beat the game you mostly won’t be pushed too hard, the corridors asking for you to be a bit quick in moving the guardians around but not really demanding complex rotation in the story levels. However, there is a system in place to make the player more bold. The hearts of Ketzal will be positioned in the holes and grabbing them is key to unlocking additional levels, and simply trying to fly through them with your block will not grant you too many by level’s end. To grab all the hearts in a hole ahead no matter its size or shape, you’ll need to move your guardian around before it even reaches the wall and line it up with different parts of the hole. Once the guardian is lined up it will mark that area, and if you can mark the entire hole before you fly through it, you’ll grab every heart in it and add to some building multipliers that further increase the heart count.

Hearts are essentially your level score as well and how you’re graded for a stage is based on how many you grabbed, but unfortunately again if you have decent reflexes you can often use a fairly safe orientation of your block to mark all parts of the opening ahead. A mix of a quick pace and the constant movement still keeps it involved and interesting enough and specific level gimmicks like pillars blocking view, corners where you have less time to see the hole ahead before it’s time to slip through, and the tile enemies add some appreciable variation, but the difficulty still feels a little mild and the entire premise of needing to earn a lot of hearts to unlock extra levels is broken by the easy endless levels where you can grab thousands of hearts with little effort or danger. The timer does at least serve as a decent consistent pressure in many stages, it providing hearts based on how quickly a level is finished but often reducing the time you can spend futzing with the hole marking system if you want to complete a level before time runs out and you fail.

 

Having the challenge and special levels beyond the all too kind endless stages though does give Ketzal’s Corridors its more difficult content. Mentioned earlier where the moments where the rotated guardian must perfectly match the shape in the wall and the game often has this occur in rapid fire towers where you only climb higher by keeping up the matching pace, and while you aren’t flying towards walls in this mode it does require more spatial awareness than the main stages. The odd block shapes featured in the extra stages really pair well with the stricter level design concept of hole-less corridors too. In the levels where the wall ahead has no holes carved out of it, you’ll notice lines on the wall that will be come holes once you line up your block with them. However, to open up a wall’s holes you’ll need to line up with every line on the wall ahead, this form of play requiring much more rapid spinning, movement, and even utilizing more than the simplest shape your block can take to actually carve the holes out before you smash into it. The main story line would have probably benefited from requiring shifts between the towers, hole-less halls, and basic play rather than shifting the more challenging modes to optional unlockable content, but these do at least bolster the game for people who have sharp reflexes or realize the tricks that oversimplify the core of this puzzle action game. Multiplayer does exist where players compete to complete a silhouette tower first or earn more hearts when clearing a corridor that could better reward the risk-taking of less safe but situationally preferable guardian orientations, but the game still doesn’t do enough to push players out of the safety bubble of the path of least resistance overall.

THE VERDICT: The game’s speed, a few level gimmicks, and the marking system for extra hearts do mean Ketzal’s Corridors can still be enjoyable despite the fact many stages in the main adventure can be cleared with pretty safe tactics, but it still allows the player to easily find a comfort zone that undermines some of the challenge in trying to slip the differently shaped guardians through upcoming walls. The easy endless levels almost invalidate the need to collect hearts beyond chasing high scores that can often be achieved with safe but quick play as well, but the variation found in the tower stages and levels where you need to carve out the holes in the walls ahead better realize the idea of trying to line up your shape just right to continue onward.

 

And so, I give Ketzal’s Corridors for Nintendo 3DS…

An OKAY rating. Ketzal’s Corridors plays it too safe in having most of its levels be the simple flying corridor stages which have guardian shapes that don’t challenge the player enough to keep it exciting. Many levels blend together since you’ll only need to get your guardian in the optimal orientation and sometimes press R to rotate it if the opening ahead favors horizontal or vertical spaces. The more challenging shapes do inject some extra life once you get a decent length into it or dabble in the extra levels, but the game really undermined its reward system with the endless levels. Stages like the ones with hole-less walls are rated on your completion speed so making the endless one perhaps rate you more on how many walls you pass through would be less damaging to the game’s incentive for clearing normal levels with the more difficult marking system, but really a greater mix of variety that forces players to adapt more than small rotations would be what could give this concept some more life. One interesting gimmick involved rotating your view of the wall ahead so you had to adjust as you approached and more levels that pushed you to adjust more than just placing your safest position in a heart-grabbing spot feels like it could have energized a game that does get a little samey over time, but having the timer be tight does at least ensure the game never feels too slow at least.

 

Whether you call it Ketzal’s Corridors or SpeedThru: Potzol’s Puzzle, this block-aligning game certainly had more room to grow than it was willing to pursue. Enabling the 3D for a bit can at least provide an interesting experience where depth that is relevant to play becomes more clearly visualized but it’s not like it’s going to provide some advantage in a game where you’ll already be able to quickly pick up on how to survive most reliably. There is a little more life if you want to push for the best level scores but quick movement can overcome the need for smart rotation still, this action puzzler feeling like it needed to challenge your mind more if it wanted to really keep the player constantly engaged in both survival and scoring.