Our valiant protagonist.
Chuchel is a Point-and-Click Game by the independent Czech studio Amanita Design.
You play as Chuchel, a round... something with a hat, and you try to get a hold on a very elusive cherry. The game is a series of unrelated puzzles in a Chowder-like world filled with colorful creatures and absurd humor.
Chuchel was released in 2018 for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. The official page of the game can be found here
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Chuchel provides examples of:
- Alien Invasion: One vignette features a series of aliens touching down to cause Chuchel problems, culminating in a huge mothership that attempts to abduct him.
- All There in the Manual: The purplish-red creature you compete/cooperate with for the cherry all game is named Kekel, and she is a newborn rat. It is spoken several times in the game including Kekel herself; but given that the speech is all gibberish, it's highly unlikely players would discern it as her name.
- The Artifact: The word "Chuchel" being rendered like black tangles of hair in the the third Pac-Man screen is a holdover from when Chuchel himself was made of black hair.
- Brain with a Manual Control: In the finale of the game, we figure out that the larger Chuchel has a big control panel in its mind that allows it to feel happy or sad. One flick of the switch later, and its foul mood is instantly lifted.
- Character Title: Chuchel is the protagonist of the game.
- Cartoon Creature; Essentially everything in the game, with few being strictly identifiable as real-world animals, and those which are being rather stylized or grotesque. Of note is Kekel, Chuchel's rival, who resembles nothing short of a dragonfruit.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: After the first alien coldly halts Chuchel's every effort with its ray gun, he defeats it by getting really mad at it, stuffing it back in its spaceship, and yelling until it flies away.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Chuchel and Kekel have been duking it out for that one cherry the whole time, but by the end, they've both secured it and were able to share it. And what's more, the larger Chuchel gives them a giant basket's worth out of the goodness of its heart!
- Fire-Forged Friends: Chuchel and his rival Kekel are in competition through all the game, but have moments of apparent friendship.
- The Grim Reaper: One vignette shows Chuchel encountering a Grim Reaper after flicking a light switch that changes the scene too many times. Flicking it more times only makes things worse by adding more Grim Reapers.
- Heavy Sleeper: The first puzzle objective of the game is to wake Chuchel up while he has several reflexes and devices to shut up noise and alarms around him.
- Here We Go Again!: At the end of the game, the larger Chuchel creature chases a pear, which is being held up by a large hand similar to the beginning of the game.
- Jerkass:
- The giant creature that deliberately keeps the cherry out of Chuchel's way every time it looks certain he's gotten it.
- The gelatin creature Chuchel encounters, which steals the cherry, laughs at Chuchel for trying to reach it, and even swallows the cherry to keep it further from him.
- The snowman in the three-realities puzzle is outwardly aggressive to Chuchel.
- The evil Chuchel in Chuchel's dazed dream.
- Macro Zone: One level consists of an oversized bathroom environment.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: One of the setpieces sees Chuchel and Kekel trapped in beakers inside one, and the player must use the correct combination of chemicals to turn them into a cat and dog, respectively, so they get angry and break out of their beakers.
- Meaningful Name: A Bilingual Bonus example - Chuchel in Czech actually means exactly what he is: a ball or lump of (usually) hair.
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: There are no comprehensible spoken words in the whole game.
- Mushroom Samba: Chuchel will undergo one after licking the mushroom(s) in the three-hats puzzle.
- Plot Allergy: The pink cyclops alien is defeated by offering it a flower and making it sneeze uncontrollably.
- Retcon: Chuchel's design was changed post-release from being a black creature with orange lips to an orange creature with yellow lips after concerns arose of it
accidentally invoking blackface visual stereotypes. As a result, all associated media also changed to feature the adjusted character design. - Running Gag:
- Chuchel and Kekel losing the cherry.
- The game's title capping off amusing cutscenes.
- Shout-Out: The snail's arcade games are references to Pac-Man, Tetris, and Space Invaders.
- Slippery MacGuffin: The cherry. It drives the whole game and it's very, very slippery.
- Starfish Aliens: The second alien Chuchel encounters is a one-eyed flower-shaped blob of a rubbery substance that is immune to blunt force and can duplicate when divided. It also has an allergy to flowers.
- Surreal Humor: The game is a very wacky cartoon filled with bizarre and grotesque imagery while maintaining a lighthearted tone. For example, Chuchel breaks open a living egg's head to hatch chicks, and it puts a hat on to cover it as a punchline, and when Chuchel is caught in a high-tech UFO's tractor beam, he gets away when Kekel pops it with scissors.
- Toilet Humor: Chuchel can drink too much water and pee on the mushrooms in the three-realities puzzle to make them grow. Alternatively, he can pee on the snowman in that puzzle, though this won't accomplish anything. When trapped in a giant creature's stomach, the player is offered the chance to exit rectally with a butt sign, and Chuchel and Kekel turn down the tunnel, a fart sounds, and they quickly run back onscreen, disgusted.
- Troll: The large creature that keeps taking the cherry seems to enjoy tormenting Chuchel. The gelatin creature in one scene seems to be as well, deliberately holding the cherry out of reach and them swallowing it while laughing at Chuchel.
- Visual Pun:
- At one point, the cherry gets switched with an explosive, making it a literal cherry bomb.
- Chuchel has a fistfight with the living teeth of a giant creature, thus literally knocking its teeth out.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Chuchel and Kekel switch between competing and cooperating to obtain the cherry, depending on the level. By the end, they become genuine friends and decide to split the cherry.
- Weight and Switch: When the cherry ends up on a pedestal surrounded by warning signs, Chuchel gets the idea to swap Kekel for it after Kekel leaps for it and Chuchel catches her. The ploy doesn't work, with Kekel weighing down the pedestal and pushing it into the ground, activating the danger.
- Womb Level: The last level takes place inside a much larger individual of Chuchel's species, whose hand, it turns out, is the one that's been moving the cherry from level to level the entire time.
- World of Chaos: The game's setting is a very surreal world that does not appear to have any sort of rules or internal logic to it at all.
- Wrap Around: The game uses its wrap around mechanic as a gimmick in a couple puzzles.
