Rope-Kun Adventure is a top-down action puzzle game that feels like it’s escaped the 3DS and made its way to PC and Switch to celebrate a playful, inventive period of gaming. Playing as Rope-Kun, you’ll have no direct attack abilities or moves whatsoever. Instead, you’ll have access to a rope as your only tool. Across over 100 levels, the adventure you’ll go on will explore defeating enemies, puzzles, and nods to retro games in new and inventive ways. This is a game that delights through its gameplay mechanics and variation above everything else.
There are 13 worlds in the game, with 8 levels each. The last level of each main world will have a boss battle that uses whatever the world’s newly introduced mechanic. Early on, you’ll be introduced to wrapping your rope, which drags behind you for a level-specific length at the press of a button, around enemies to squeeze them to death. Then you’ll realise your rope can catch fire if you drag it over flames. That introduces you to match-based puzzle levels where you’ll need to burn the matches by lighting them with your rope before it burns up. These are simple to understand and fairly simple to execute, but it’s not the difficulty that drives Rope-Kun Adventure. Instead, it’s the inventive and playful level designs that drive you forward. Soon, you’ll be attaching ropes to boxes to drag them around to solve pressure plate puzzles, before unlocking the other two rope types to switch between.
Besides your main flexible rope, you’ll get a wire rope and a snake rope. The wire rope bends rather than flexes, and is used for physics-based challenges and rainbow light puzzles. These involve bouncing canonballs around to smash boxes or send-ups of Arkanoid games to smash bricks. You’ll draw out the wire and see if you get the right angle. The light puzzles are similar, using the rainbow lights to charge crystals to open the exit doors. When it comes to combat, the wire rope can be charged with electricity, blasting off spiked armour from enemies before you switch to the original rope to squeeze them lasso-style. The snake rope has a weighted snake head at the end, which comes in handy in two ways. Firstly, the snake rope is retractable, and enemies can be bashed into a daze if clobbered by the snake head. Some enemies can only be defeated this way. When it comes to puzzles, you can draw out shapes and continuous lines in the sand and dirt with the snake head to solve connection puzzles. Over the course of the game, Rope-Kun switches in and out elements of all of these ideas and keeps things fresh by combining them in different ways.
Alongside excellent level design, Rope-Kun’s controls are also a joy to use. Using the rope is predictable and easy. Rope-Kun moves at a slightly slower than average pace, but that often works to the game’s advantage. Levels are quite small, often taking up half the game screen, so zipping around would negate half the task and charm. This isn’t a difficult game, but hints for each level are provided if you get stuck. I only lost to a boss level once, where I’d slightly misunderstood the objective, and that was my only fail. Only the final boss takes more than three hits to defeat, and Rope-Kun has three hits before a game over. Thankfully, as the levels are quite bite-sized, that is a very small penalty. I feel like the difficulty, whilst easy, is pitched in a way that prioritises variety and short bursts of dopamine over bigger challenges. There’s nothing wrong with being slightly easy if a game keeps you engaged and entertained. Rope-Kun Adventure did just that.
To me, Rope-Kun Adventure feels like a lost gem from either 1994 or 2010. Its charming characters, fun and unique rope mechanics, and playful level design all combine to be far greater than the sum of its parts. This is a gem a game, and one I thoroughly recommend for all the family. Approachable action puzzling at its finest.
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