Who'd want to be a cow? Really? Sure, it might look like an easy life, standing around in the countryside all day with nary a care in the world, pooping where you feel like it and sleeping in late.
But really, cows have got a bit of a bum deal. First of all, we eat them, then we turn bits of them into clothes to wear and, if that wasn't bad enough, certain elements of society derive great mirth from tipping them over.
Now there's another embarrassment: watching the poor things explode in a shower of milk and meat in the bizarrely-named
Kukuxumusu Farm, a puzzle game with a definite macabre edge.
We should point out, before PETA boycotts
Pocket Gamer, that making cows pop isn't the point of the game, nor an activity that any of us would ever endorse (it's far too messy a business). But it is the downfall of your bovine charges – and an ashamedly amusing one, granted – should you fail in your job of milking them.
That you play a sheep is neither here nor there, and is indicative of the game's off-centre approach to life where your goal is to make as much money as you can by running a small-scale dairy operation.
Beginning with one cow, it's up to you to feed it and milk it successfully. You're given a bucket, a pile of nosh to put in one end of the cow and a tanker to take away what comes out of the other. The challenge lies in balancing the input and output.
Over-feed a cow and it'll grow fat with milk quickly, which is good but only if you can relieve it in time. Under-feed it and it'll stop producing milk and starve. Either way, you've got a dead cow on your hands. Over-milking or under-milking can be equally terminal.
Now, the feed/milk balance is pretty easy to maintain when you've just got a single cow, rather than cattle. But you'll soon have enough money to start buying more animals, up to five in total, and this is where things get hectic. Unless you can keep an eye on each animal's demands you'll fast end up back where you started, with just one cow.
To make things easier you can buy an automatic milker, which cuts out the need to transfer milk via bucket to the tanker (you can only fit a limited amount of milk in your bucket), but this needs to be turned on and off or it'll literally suck a cow dry.
Life as a farm hand is pretty challenging, then, although it's not always for the right reasons.
Firstly, there's a very fine margin of error between a cow living on the edge and actually expiring, so much so that there's often not enough time to recognise that an animal's in trouble and getting there to do something about it. Because you replenish feed on one side of the screen and milk on the other, if you're at the fifth milking station you've got to walk all the way up the line, around the corner and back down the otherside to relieve a rapidly fattening cow, a journey that can't be completed in short enough a time.
This results in more dead beef than you'll find on the shelves at your local Sainsburys, the majority of which you've had little chance to save. This problem is compounded by a method of movement that's clunky (you move up, down, left and right as if on a grid) and not as intuitive as it should be.
But once you learn to live with those faults,
Kukuxumusu Farm is a fairly enjoyable enterprise. It's never going to win any awards – it's too shallow, with not enough variation or progression in the game to keep you coming back for long – but while it lasts it's good fun.
This is largely down to the child-like visuals (which look as though they've been created with a set of felt-tip pens in a coffeebreak), and the insanely humorous details of the cows' lives and deaths.
Is it worth taking a punt on this particular pint? If you're looking for an open-ended, casual puzzle game, no; there are far better examples on offer (
Chuzzle Mobile is our new fav). But if you fancy something a little bit different and have the patience to persist with the niggles,
Kukuxumusu Farm will keep you entertained for as long as it takes to learn how to pronounce its name.
