Mochi Mochi Boy is best described as snake – the puzzle game. You play as the titular Mochi Mochi Boy who with every move stretches and grows. Your aim for each puzzle is to fill the entire screen without backing yourself into a corner you can manoeuvre out of.
Over the course of 150 levels in the main ‘Classic’ mode, you’ll be slowly introduced to new puzzle mechanics to keep you challenged. Firstly you’ll just need to work out how to avoid dead ends, then screen wrapping is introduced. In typical arcade fashion, moving off the right hand side lets you appear on the left and so on. Soon coloured warping blocks are introduced too and then other traps to avoid. The premise never changes – you still need to cover all the heart patterned floor. With each new challenge comes a bit of a difficulty spike as you work out how to clear the level and many have several paths to clear them. This narrows down to a single route as the game gets harder.
Outside of that, Mochi Mochi Boy has a Dungeon mode which made little sense to me. Whereas Classic lets you take all the time you need, Dungeon places a timer on your progess and each failure docks you time. It places lots of weird traps in the levels randomly but the random generation seems to clump them together in strange patterns. Whilst the levels are still passable, they make little tactical sense and the difficulty ramps up far too quickly. It also tries to make traps rhythmic but the gap is anything but rhythmic so it doesn’t gel together very well. During my play time, I had by far the most fun in classic mode.
There are also 100 collectable slimes but aside from looking cute (but sadly still), they do nothing and don’t really give a proper incentive in the game to collect them all. It all feels a bit low thought. A 2 player race mode would have made this game much more replayable. Making the slimes relevant to the game would have been nice too. You can paint your Mochi Mochi Boy a colour – you could have had the slimes unlock patterns or something. It wouldn’t have taken much – but then this feels undercooked throughout.
Whilst you do get two platinums for your trouble (PS4/Vita crossbuy), there are better Ratalaika games published easy plats to get. This boy is sadly, rather forgettable.
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