I am very passionate about Cut The Rope and I have just recently finished the entire three-season run of the game with my partner.
Cut The Rope is a mobile game developed by ZeptoLab and released in 2010 that immediately garnered a massive audience, and still today sees considerable engagement from players. The game is comprised of a series of puzzles, each with the same objectives: to collect the three stars by passing over them with the candy piece, and to get the candy in the mouth of Om Nom, the adorably hungry green creature.
Puzzles are organized in sets of 25, and each set is called a ‘box’. Each box has a particular theme that changes the appearance of the puzzle’s background, as well as introduces a new mechanic that adds complexity to each puzzle within it. For instance, the ‘Magic Box’ adds sets of magician’s hats that allow objects to teleport between them. Boxes often reuse mechanics from previous boxes. This organization of mechanic introduction creates a steady, reliable relationship between game and player—while the player may not know the layout or strategy by which to finish a puzzle when they start it, they can be certain a new mechanic system won’t be introduced unless they’re beginning a new box. This also gives players confidence that they will have time (25 levels to be exact) to master a new mechanic, instead of waiting in fear that a new mechanic will be added before they have time to become comfortable with the previous one.
Boxes aren’t only the organizational system of the game, but also the environment in which the game takes place. It’s useful to interpret each box as its own architecture of sorts since it encompasses the gameplay and the world’s story. The box architecture serves the function of alluding to a child’s tendency to create an imaginary world within ordinary boxes, which lends an explanation to the existence of Om Nom. Additionally, the box architecture creates the constraint of what is in and out of bounds in the puzzle. These two architectural functions also lead into one another; one may interpret that the candy leaving the box, and thus failing the level, is evoking the way imaginary ideas that live inside the box become unrealistic when they leave the imaginary world.
The steady progression of adding new mechanics is also accompanied by a very subtle ramp in difficulty through the many boxes of the game. The ramp is almost difficult to notice, until I reached the final few boxes of the game and found myself spending more than ten minutes on some of the puzzles. Difficulty in Cut The Rope is brought about by many factors, including the amount of interactions (cutting, popping, swiping, moving) required to complete the puzzle, the precise timing needed to reach the end, and the physical dexterity of completing many actions in quick succession. These factors compound with each other, and offer a compelling puzzle-solving experience with intentional level design and rewarding mechanics.
