Rating:

Enough plumbers is fun, hard, challenging, interesting, pretty, imaginative and lots of other good words. It has a strong core mechanic and some excellent level design.

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Full Review

I once had this idea for a game. Well actually, it wasn't really an idea for a game, so much as an aspect of one. I thought about some games that measure a particular abstract element of the environment, like which way the wind was blowing in Wind Waker, or how suspicious you appeared in Assassin' s Creed. My idea was to put a meter that measures say, the dampness of the soil your character is standing on, or the distance your character is from the London eye. Except there wouldn't be any soil based puzzles, and you'd never actually visit the London eye: it'd just be there to play with the player's expectations, and to undermine the way they think about the game.

It's that same kind of subversion that Enough Plumbers pulls off really well.

I didn't review it when it came out earlier this year because I had just gone through two Super Mario pastiches in a row, and it's been on the back-burner since. From a presentation standpoint, Enough Plumbers is a cheeky riff on the esteemed Nintendo character, from it's dungaree-wearing protagonist to it's strangely familiar music. It all looks and sounds great, but the gameplay is so different from the average Mario game that I don't quite understand why it's a straight-up parody. Oh well.

Speaking of gameplay: it's one of those games that words can't quite do justice to. The basic jist of it is when your character collects coins he creates a clone of himself. quickly you begin to amass large groups of plumbers, and the goal is to get any of your little dudes to the finishing flag.

What makes it so interesting is that you're often in control of 5-10 characters at a single time, and it's unlikely you'll be able to save any or even most of them. This creates a kind of weird disconnect between you and the action: without a single character to latch on to I considered them all more expendable.

There's some odd subversive moments where you must kill numerous character, in order to save at least one of them. The game is constantly playing with the audience's in-built reflex of trying not to die, by asking them to consider the importance of one character's survival over another. In many of the levels, killing yourself is a viable tactic, only because you're not really killing 'yourself'. Once again, it's a mechanic that needs to be played with to be understood.

Enough Plumbers is hard, interesting, free, and a good way to spend an hour. Go play it. No seriously, why are you reading this? Go play it already!