Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Using a series of moveable ramps, guide a ball into the bucket.

Review: Designer Tyler Sticka has created a very elegant physics-based game. Each level you are given a few ramps, which you can move and angle. You must position the ramps in such a way that when you drop the ball from the tube at the top of the screen it rolls down the ramps and falls in the bucket at the bottom. If it falls into the lava or gets sucked up by one of the many obstacles in the game, you have to try again until you get things just right.

The implementation of physics in this game feels very smooth. The ball seems to roll just as you expect it would. Sometimes the ramps you are given are very tiny and hardly enough to move the ball across the screen. But if you experiment with placing the ramps lower so the ball bounces or angling them more severely so you get momentum on a roll, you will discover that there are many ways to make the ball hit its target.

Later in the game, you will have to work around obstacles, such as immovable platforms, ball-sucking vacuum holes and hungry piranhas which eat your ball. The joy in playing this game is that there are often many different ways to arrange the ramps to get the ball in the bucket. When a ball falls off course, sometimes making very minor adjustments to the angles or placement will successfully alter the course.

The game has many challenging levels and its simple clean graphics and responsive controls will keep you playing for hours.