Publisher: NewKidco
Developer: Culture Publishing
Release Date: 3/30/1999
Date Played: 12/5/2019
Region: USA
Time Played: 1 hour
What’d you think?: I was skeptical that the typically laconic Hello Kitty could provide a “frenzy” of cubes, but this game was indeed frenetic. Hello Kitty walks automatically through the stage, climbing up to 1 block high. You can switch her direction at will, but you can’t pause her. There’s things on each stage to collect, and you have to use blocks that fall from the top of the screen to set up the stage so that Hello Kitty can navigate through it. The blocks are colored and if you match 3 of the same color together, they all disappear. It is necessary to make this happen, and doing it on accident can lead to ruin. Also ruinous are some of Hello Kitty’s friends (enemies? brandmates?), here to make things even more difficult. One will just wander around getting in the way, but Badtz-Maru will sometimes get angry and kick a block next to him to destroy it. You can climb over your friends (or even use them as temporary scaffolding); they’re 1 block tall too, but if there’s a roof above you it’s a logjam. Hello Kitty does have lives in this game, if you run out of time, fill past the top with blocks like in Tetris, or drop Hello Kitty off the screen entirely, you’ll have to start over. The puzzles got tricky pretty quickly, considering the age range, and the aesthetic is a bit of a nightmare, but this was a fun game.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0NaR0eEeU4
