Crullo: Adventures of a Donut
The premise here is pure whimsy. After Glubada Pond, the developer settled on a more traditional platform adventure. Instead of a fish shooting bubbles, we have a doughnut shooting raspberry jelly. They didn’t think really hard about this.
Once they settled on a theme, the rest of the game was me screwing around with tools. This may be the first game where A-J Games did all the visuals in Deluxe Paint, and the result is anything but subtle: piles of random blocks decorated with gradient fills. Likewise for the sound the developer pulled out an old Radio Shack keyboard that had been gathering dust since the late ’80s. Whether or not the notion is appropriate to a game about a doughnut, all the sounds are musical, or at least synthesized.
The game, then, has a strange atmosphere. The sound effects give it a cold, mournful, and sterile sound. The visuals are noisy and hard to differentiate. The only thing in keeping with the theme is the monsters; for foes the levels are littered with more savory bakery items: bagels, croissants, English muffins. It's unclear what the monsters are up to, and they have little personality or behavior. They're just sort of there, as obstacles.
The developer put just as much effort into the level design. They chose a block set, settled on a starting and an end point, and drew random, winding tunnels and passages and rooms to connect the two. There's the odd secret passage or geographical feature, but they never really made sure the geometry matched the character’s movements and abilities. If it's possible to progress, it's fine.
