"Pig, can you help?" Your porcine pal is trapped on the other side of the river and needs you. What do you do? Why, push around some blocks of course, stacking two to form a bridge, and cross over to be by her side. "Pig, I need you." Again? Trees, rocks, and other landscape limitations are making this friend-saving business a bit more difficult, but you can do it! After all, this is what Pig Friends do: they're there for each other. So around trees, over rivers, across flower-dabbled green pastures you continue on, solving the block sliding puzzles just to reach your friend in need.

This Hayden Scott-Baron Puzzlescript creation is both cute and clever, a casual puzzle game with just enough difficulty to engage the brain and a sweet story to warm the heart. Using the [arrow] keys to move, position pig behind a block opposite the direction you want to go, then continue that direction to push the block where you want it. Since you can only move a rock in this way, pre-planning is needed if you want to avoid backtracking. If you do overstep or fudge up, it's simple enough to rewind step-by-step with [U] or to return to the beginning of a level with [R]. If only life's problems were so easy to surmount! The controls are as responsive as they are smooth and quick. When you move, it feels like pig is gliding, which cuts some drudgery from the menial bits of block moving, letting you stay focused on the problem solving bits. The first few of the 40 levels are a breeze to complete, but soon they are more elaborate as new obstacles and layouts result in fewer directions to go without getting stuck in a corner.

There is a downside in how elaborate it can be: all the adjusting and rearranging, running around and moving boxes back and forth can make you feel like a particularly fussy warehouse worker. If that's not your sort of thing, the sometimes convoluted routes and seeming repetitiveness might get you down. In that case, you can always stand on a flower tile and press [X] to skip a level as often as you'd like. These puzzles are the perfect fit for players who enjoy arrangement puzzles, and the need to move each just so is what makes it enjoyably thinky. Besides, all that repeated effort is a great way of conveying the lengths one friend will go to help out another. Good friends are to be cherished and appreciated. We all need friends like pig friends.

Play Pig Friends