Welcome to your first day on the job, intern! Before we get started, let's film a quick video showcasing how everyone — even interns — can start building planets! Just hit the ENTER key to start!... What did you do?!
Shown at the Wholesome Direct 2023, in Bubblegum Galaxy, you take control of Haco, the new intern who is just starting their job as a planet architect! But strangely, the Bubblegum Galaxy server crashed, and once it rebooted, the entire galaxy was deleted.
With a new demo available, I decided I'd give this title a shot — after all, I've been excited about it ever since the previous direct! This short, one-hour playthrough means you can enjoy Bubblegum Galaxy in one sitting before you finish it. In it, you will be in charge of building seven total planets as an architect and interacting with some of the characters in the game!
The underlying office drama regarding who deleted the galaxy and why isn't the central point of the demo — this early in the game, everyone and their mother is convinced that Haco did it, but everyone in the office is... surprisingly reasonable. The few characters I did get to meet were enjoyable to speak to (except for Penti — screw you, pal!), but I do wish there was a way to speed up the text boxes and their dialogue, as some of them talk r e a l l y s l o w l y. And if you don't care for the narrative, not only do you have to talk to them with slow text boxes, but you will also, after some planets are rebuilt, be forced to talk to some characters.
That said, I didn't personally mind the mandatory dialogue because I quite enjoy the cute and silly setting that Bubblegum Galaxy takes place on. Although we don't get to start our true investigation behind who actually deleted everything, we get a glimpse at some of the gameplay elements Bubblegum Galaxy has to offer, and I’d wager that’s far more important in this case!
Spanning seven worlds — most of which work as a tutorial to teach you the basics of the gameplay — you play as Haco and begin reconstructing the galaxy one tile at a time. The puzzle aspect is pretty simple: you get more points for matching colour and tile types. The idea is to score the highest score possible and complete some of the various tasks that each planet has.
To spice up the gameplay, you will start getting quests that you need to complete in order to get more tiles and keep the score going. These quests mostly constitute of matching everything together, forcing you to put mountains with mountains, trees with trees, or tile colours with one another. It's fun piecing together the puzzle and completing the quest, but even if you fail, you can have several on the board, which means you can bounce back from failing one.
Then there are the combo quests, which force you to place tiles in a combo around adjacent areas for a set amount (three or four in the early game) until you complete it and earn tiles. This ensures that you are consistently strategising, but getting a combo tile at the wrong moment or the wrong place can throw a wrench in your plans; I really enjoyed it when that happened.
By playing properly and completing quests, you can theoretically play endlessly, as once you've completed the planet-specific quests, you can still keep going to see your high score skyrocket. To leave the level, you have to instead go to your menu and leave the planet, which was a bit uncomfortable because it made me feel like I was deleting my progress, but it isn't a major gripe — I just hope a prompt is added in the future to indicate you finished the quests and you can safely close the world. I don’t want to pull a Haco and delete a planet… again.
The short gameplay is a great way to see what Bubblegum Galaxy has to offer: a cute story, enjoyable puzzle-based gameplay, and planet architecture as you unravel the truths about who reset the server. If nothing else, Bubblegum Galaxy got me pumped to try other titles in the genre whilst I wait for its release, and I'd say that's a win for Smarto Club!
