Today, we’re looking at something lighter. Lord knows I need something light and simple. Stress and current events led to me getting my personal Twitter account getting banned. So what if I told someone to play Un-A-Live? Bluecheck freaks spout genocidal shit all the time. I’m sad that five years of my life are gone, but maybe it’s for the best considering how Twitter (excuse me, X the Everything App (blaze your glory)) is turning into Stormfront 2.

But enough about me, speaking of things that got tainted by an overseeing power, let’s talk about a game that’s just about to: Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe!

Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe is a puzzle platformer by Andrew Morrish, published under Adult Swim Games (important fact for later). This game holds a special place in my heart because it was something I played a bunch in college on a cheap used laptop in-between classes. In fact, I was really surprised to see that the local score leaderboards still used my old name during my revisit.

You are a little guy armed with a weapon of some sort, dropped into a falling block puzzle game field. If you shoot a block, you damage it and all blocks of the same color connected to it, netting you more points the bigger the cluster is when you destroy it. Ideally, you’d be shooting up smaller formations of blocks so that large structures of the same color properly build up to get more points.

But true to the platformer aspect of the name, there are threats to deal with. Each level has a specialized set of threats that will kill you and end the run, from the haunted mansion setting down graves for ghosts to roam the playing field to the space station dropping cannons that fire shots in wavy patterns. To get rid of them, you have to destroy a block connected to them, which may be difficult depending on how the level’s built itself. The one shared threat across all levels that you can’t do anything about are the falling blocks themselves, which reduce your level and ability to better break blocks, if not kill you outright if they fall on you. Every so often the game will drop multiple rows of blocks in a row, sending you scrambling to fit in the gaps.

In chasing higher scores, there’s a tension to how you play. Letting big structures build up is important for score, but in letting that happen, there’s less free space to run around in. There’s less room to maneuver around hazards, and the higher the play field is, the less time you have to react to dropping blocks. You can’t be overzealous in clearing the playfield either, because the bottom of the screen is a kill plane, and it’s very plausible for you to accidentally destroy the ground beneath you depending on how the blocks line up.

Revisiting this game has been a blast. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe is easy to grasp and has enough complexity to keep it from being boring but not enough for it to confound people that aren’t super into puzzle games. Like, imagine if the blocks combo cleared each other after you destroyed a structure that was supporting some of them, that’d be fucked up. It’s a perfectly nice blend of platformer and action puzzle games. Some of the characters I thought were kinda meh to use, but it’s all good fun!

So you might be wondering: why did I revisit it all of a sudden?

Back in March, it was announced that Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of Adult Swim Games and probably the most fucked up media conglomerate we have right now, was going to have all Adult Swim Games published titles delisted for… reasons. Really, I looked at a bunch of articles to try to find some reasoning for it, because at least stuff like the shelving of Coyote vs Acme had reasoning (if fucked up and stupid) but I really couldn’t find anything? It costs nothing to keep these games up, and Warner could have at least transferred publishing rights to the original developers, but they didn’t want to do the bare minimum of doing that, instead leaving developers to republish things themselves and lose out on everything connected to their original pages (while also legally being required to scrub out the original publishing credits).

It’s stupid how games can just casually get fucked over by parent companies. Just days ago hit game Helldivers 2 nearly had its playerbase fucked over by Sony forcing the usage of PSN accounts on Arrowhead, but Sony stepped off after loud demand. Unfortunately, given that Coyote vs Acme is still in limbo in spite of so many people openly wanting the head of that bitch idiot David Zaslav, I don’t see a happy ending here.

I wish I was faster with getting this out, because Warner’s due to get rid of Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe within the next few days, if it hasn’t already by the time this is posted. Earlier versions of Super Puzzle Platformer still exist on Morrish’s itch page, but Deluxe? Welp. I hope the best for Andrew Morrish and his fellow devs, because they really don’t deserve this at all. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe is a wonderful time-killer, and I hope it will come back in better circumstances.