Poosh XL

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Poosh XL is a mobile-style single-button Arcade-style game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game presents players with simple visuals and a simple gameplay premise – you control the movement of a circle along a corridor by timing a button press using a changing indicator that determines the circle’s angle and movement speed. Using this, you must proceed as far as possible without touching any walls or obstacles.

The presentation in this game will seem very familiar to anyone who played developer Adamvision (previously Nickervision)’s previous game, Ding Dong XL. Much as that game did, Poosh XL features a presentation using simple geometric shapes drawn in a line art style with a neon-style glow against a black background. This is backed by simple but decent techno-style music. Overall, the presentation here works well enough for what it’s aiming for, even if it’s not aiming to do anything especially novel or impressive.

When it comes to the gameplay, I think there’s a seed of a good idea here, but I feel like the game takes its core concept just a bit too far. Reducing the movement to one button makes for simple but compelling gameplay, and this game definitely succeeds at fostering the “just one more run” sorta’ feeling this style of game aims for. Unfortunately, I feel like the game gives the player too little control over their own fate, making for a game that feels unfairly difficult.

This is because the aiming for the angle of your next move and the bard determining the strength of that move are both fluctuating at the same time, and this is all while moving obstacles in the stage continue to move. This means that maybe you get a decent angle to get past obstacles, but it’s too strong and will propel you into a wall. Wait a bit more and maybe you have the right angle and strength, but obstacles have now moved to block your path and you need to wait again… all while a slowly moving bar comes up from behind you to threaten to end your run if you wait longer. And if your movement places you directly near a moving obstacle, you may as well give up because you won’t likely find a viable combination of factors before that obstacle moves to kill you.

One of any number of small changes could have alleviated this problem. Have the movement/strength be set one after another (like in Golf videogames), or have the movement timing-based but make the strength of your movement based on how long you hold the button. Either of these solutions would retain the game’s one-button setup while giving the player more control over their own fate.

As-is, Poosh XL is unfortunately a decent idea that takes too much control away from the player, leaving too much of their fate up to luck. With just a few tweaks, this could have been a really compelling Arcade-style game. Unfortunately, the game we actually got is just too frustrating to recommend.

tl;dr – Poosh XL is a single-button Arcade-style game where players use a single button-press to propel their circle through a neon-lit gauntlet of obstacles, trying to avoid touching anything. While the core concept here is great, the way this game makes multiple fluctuating factors all tie to a single button press takes far too much control away from the player and makes it feel like success or failure in this game is too dependent on luck. As a result, this game is too frustrating to recommend.

Grade: C-

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