When I was younger, for Christmas I was given Screwball Scramble. It is a mechanical maze with various buttons, knobs, sliders and gyroscopes to move around to guide a ball bearing from A to B. A ticking timer would count down and after 60 seconds, if you hadn’t made it, you’d be buzzed out. It was frantic, addictive, frustrating, difficult and spawned a sequel and a lot of love over the decades since its release.
Mighty Marbles is what Screwball Scramble would be like if it released an official digital game. The concept is exactly the same – indeed the first level is the Australian variant of the original game. Yet Mighty Marbles takes the idea and runs with it, expanding on it in a myriad of ways. The game contains 36 levels across 4 themed worlds and each level has its own unique set of obstacles to clear. Developer James Oliver has ensured everything could be replicated in a real-world mechanical maze setting too and that includes the control system.
Setting Mighty Marbles apart from every other marble game is its control scheme. Each level has a unique block of controls – each block relating to a specific obstacle. One might use the analogue stick to tilt the floor. Another might be a pressure lever to press and hold to release a catapult. The next might twist and rotate a spinning bat to knock your ball around. Others might raise or lower gates or platforms. They emulate the real Screwball Scramble game and often play tricks with your left/right brain coordination. This is because some controls affect multiple moving parts. An example is a left/right lever that would move four small platforms which you need to join up at the right time to create a bridge. Press left and two platforms will move left but two will move right. Cue me getting very crossed up and watching my marble roll off the edge and need to respawn repeatedly until I get it right. Some may find it a tad too difficult but with unlimited time and respawns that place you just before the current obstacle you’ve failed, Mighty Marble is hard but fair.
Alongside the unique and faithful control scheme is the fixed camera angles that are designed to trip you up. When you move from obstacle to obstacle, the camera pans to a new perspective. You can always see what you are doing but sometimes you are at an angle or going towards or away from the camera. This means doing bunny hop bounces or timing rolling between spinning windmills can be difficult because the perspective can be misleading. A few times it drove me to distraction but after a while, you get used to the sadistic camera angles ways and things start to feel a bit easier.
The fixed camera angle does become an issue with the few bugs I encountered playing the game though. Sometimes when a marble falls off the course it will respawn in a blind spot that you can’t see. When this happened I just had to restart the level as I had no idea what to do. The marbles occasionally respawn completely invisible too which also forced a restart. It isn’t anything game-breaking but both issues cropped up repeatedly across my playtime.
Mighty Marbles is all about skill and speed and whilst you can just aim for survival, most of the cosmetics and bonus game modes are locked behind achieving certain time trial medals. Individually you are rewarded a gold, silver, bronze or a brown pass stamp but to unlock the hardcore mode you need to chain all 9 levels in a world back to back for an overall time that matches a medal. This is where the true skill comes into play. I found in each world there was always one bogey level that I’d spend far too much time just trying to finish and that would weigh down my overall time. Without a level select option, you need to decide early on if you want to restart a level as you can’t restart a level if you finish it. It makes achieving and unlocking things truly rewarding but I suspect more players than not will struggle to get there. For those tapping out on the skill tree early, collector mode brings a puzzle element to the game. It places loads of coins around each level for you to try to collect. You don’t need to be fast, you just need to be skillful to manipulate the level to reach all the coins and it offers a different flavour of gameplay.
As a lifelong fan of Screwball Scramble, I felt right at home with Mighty Marbles. It is full of charm, nostalgia, tactile control schemes and maddeningly difficult challenges. Overcome a challenge and you’ll be incredibly satisfied. I’d file Mighty Marbles under “harder than it looks” but it is a challenge that I keep coming back to over and over again. I’m determined to get faster, better and more accurate on my runs. It brings out the same competitive nature of me as the original physical game did in the early 90s. This is a great love letter to many a childhood and one that I’ll grow fond of for years to come.
Review copy provided by the developer. Mighty Marbles is out now on Steam.
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