Super Monkey Ball and Marble Madness are games that you either love or hate. Mercury Hg follows some philosophies from both games and the end result is something very challenging if you pay attention to all of the secondary tasks, but also something very simplistic because of the small number of variables throughout the entirety of the puzzles. Mercury Hg is a game about cerebral puzzle-solving on one hand, but it never really follows up on the allure of in-depth puzzles. Instead what you’re given are a series of decently thought-out levels and mazes but the key to solving them isn’t all that challenging intellectually – a lot of the time it comes down to simply matching colors even in the later levels.

Mercury Hg is not a puzzle game for everyone who enjoys puzzlers. You control a blob of mercury by tilting the axes of the game world and making your mercury slide along the surface. This can sometimes be pretty jarring to look at and it can even obscure your view of the level itself because of the camera angles. You can manually adjust the camera but it’s not always convenient to do so. The game is very high pressure because in the vast majority of the levels you’re able to slide off the surface resulting in a game over if the entirety of your blob goes over the edge. If you have a close encounter with the edge of a map you will lose a percentage of your mercury which will make you fail specific objectives. The more objectives you complete the more points you accumulate to unlock levels in the main Discovery mode as well as Bonus levels.

Reaching your goals in Mercury Hg boils down to a couple of key factors. The game is heavily based on trial and error. If you’re attempting to complete all objectives that each level has to offer in Discovery mode, be prepared to get incredibly frustrated when you suddenly fall off a hidden ledge or encounter a disguised trap. Many of the levels in the game force you to make key decisions very quickly and this results in a ton of frustration because often times you’ll make the seemingly obvious decision only to be greeted with an invisible wall that you cannot pass because you didn’t complete a pre-requisite task that you didn’t know about. This would be fine except many times when you do make the wrong decision and attempt to back-track the floor will fall from under you, a previously hidden danger in the level will appear and wipe you out or you’ll be forced to make more quick decisions and end up in the exact same situation on the other side of the level.

Typically you will be forced to navigate through each level searching for certain types of gates that change the color of your mercury. When you are the appropriate color you can engage different obstacles in the level that are of the same color. Sometimes you’re asked to combine two different colors to make a brand new one and this is done by intentionally splitting your mercury and controlling each blob at the same time as you tilt the level. This is where much of the difficulty in the game is found – many times you must navigate two or more blobs around the dangers of each level but you can never control them independently. You’re often forced to stick one blob in the corner as you tilt the world around very carefully to guide your second blob around.

There are a few curveballs thrown in your path along the way, sometimes there are strategically placed magnets in your path that will cause your mercury to suddenly veer off course and you have to adjust your path accordingly. There are also sections where the floor will move or even only appear as you approach it – similar to something like Bastion. Many levels are incredibly easy, even as you approach the more difficult levels it’s very possible that the next level you face will be easier than any of the previous ones. There are 60 levels in Discovery mode and 36 of those are available in the Challenge mode. Challenge mode tries to mix things up by removing the timer found in discovery mode and by giving you unique tasks to complete in each level before solving all of the puzzles. There are also 20 unique Bonus levels that you must unlock via Discovery mode.

There are tutorial levels that can help you understand some of what’s expected out of you but the real way you’ll learn how to play Mercury Hg is by trial and error. It can be compared very loosely to something like Trials HD in a way. It’s certainly nowhere near as demanding as Trials HD, but the only way you’ll find the solutions to some puzzles is by throwing yourself off the edge sometimes. Mercury Hg has some design issues – mainly the uneven difficulty curve in Discovery mode. It’s never crushingly hard – in fact most of the difficulty you will find in the game is in the Challenge mode. The challenge mode is very demanding and forces you to perfect your strategy in each level.

Mercury Hg has a pretty inviting but very simple aesthetic, the menus are designed in a fun and concise way and the game has a lot of bright colors. The music included with the game gets the job done, but you’re actually encouraged to stream in your own music and the game world will act as a visualizer of sorts. It’s an effect we’ve seen before in other games but it does add a nice layer of eye candy to the game.

Mercury Hg sports leaderboards for every single level and mode and you can even download a ghost of the top players on the leaderboards. Mercury Hg is a fun game if you don’t mind trial and error gameplay, it won’t wow you with the depth of any puzzles and the difficulty isn’t actually found within the puzzles but within how the game controls and how it indicates objectives to the player. It’s very reasonably priced at $5 and that makes it easier to recommend.

Players: 1
Platforms: PSN, Xbox Live Arcade
Developer: Eiconic Games
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Price: $5
ESRB: Everyone
Rating: