I like cats. I dig on their qualities: Their generally amiable nature; their pettability; my intense desire to travel the world in a hot air balloon with one, possibly while solving mysteries. I also like this new thing I found out about them, which is their tendency to find underwater palaces while traveling in an unsturdy submarine. The only problem with them is their tendency to drown easily. That is why I owe yet another tip of the hat to the video game industry, and their relentless drive to provide realistic simulators for every facet of life’s complex tapestry: Uopoko deals both with the feline tendency for nautical exploration, and the problems they may encounter in this environment, when deprived of oxygen. It is also a puzzle game.

And, sure, yes, the field of puzzle games is not particularly a barren one; the inverse of this is true to the extent that you have almost certainly been seduced by a game of this nature in the past. The venerable Tetris; the coy Bust-A-Move; the chibi-intensive Puzzle Fighter; my personal favorite, Magical Drop 3; Tetris Attack, Yoshi’s Cookie; there are streetfuls of them, their skirts hiked to half-thigh, their lips pouted. Their charms are many and potent. I should know; I once spent an intimate month with Dr. Mario, and by the end I was thinking about capsule-placement during sexual intercourse. That is the sort of mind-control shit we’re dealing with here. Uopoko won’t lay eggs in your brain like that, though; this isn’t some Platonic Gaming Ideal experience which only select few have experienced and now I am passing the wisdom down from yea on high blah blah whatevz. What differentiates it from other such digital matching frenzies are a select clutch of innate and excellent differences.

For example, I cannot readily think of any other puzzle game whose player-cabinet interactivity is relegated to exactly one button. The game’s control is not unlike that of a pachinko or pinball machine — you pull a plunger down and hurl a colored ball into a tank full of other colored balls. For my money, this is an excellent feature — it introduces an uncertainty into play. In most other puzzle games, you depend on your ability to twitch-match; to set up complex chain reactions in mere seconds. To keep your kitten-aquanauts from drowning, on the other hand, you also need aim. Bust-A-Move also employs this sort of rubric, but they allow you a second or two to squint at the direction of your bubble-trebuchet, the wimps.

Another big feature of Uopoko is the exchange of competitive multiplayer for cooperative multiplayer, which makes a sort of contextual sense, because when your victory causes a kitten to drown, nobody is a true winner. On the other hand, head-to-head puzzle action is, let’s be honest, the only real redeeming factor of any puzzle game ever made by humans ever. However, since Uopoko features not an infinitely advancing expanse of bubbles to pop, but instead, a big concrete wall, competitive play would have likely devolved into races to stage completion, rather than the schadenfreude-packed bubble-dump most puzzle games employ. What makes competitive play worthwhile is that the launched bubbles can knock into each other in midair, and players competing for a higher point total who both see a delicious combo can quickly find themselves with an unusable bubble-stack. It’s not quite the same; in recent years, players have come to expect a more visceral victory than this game affords. But it is a different experience than can be found elsewhere, and as such, rides on its own merits.

The real upshot to Uopoko’s style is that it’s very beginner-friendly, and those without much gaming experience can be easily coaxed into a game. I wouldn’t want to entreat a relative newbie to a game of Dr. Mario (especially since they included it with Wario Ware, making it my bus-ride time-passer de rigueur), but I would be more than given to ask someone how they felt about advancing nautical cat science. And what more can you ask from a video game? What more?