Collection essentials #273: Sutte Hakkun (SNES)

Here’s one of Nintendo’s most obscure great games. 

In Japan, there was an accessory released for the Super Famicom called the “Satellaview” rather late in the console’s lifespan. I’m not going to go into a large amount of detail about it because I don’t own one and it’s kinda off-topic, but it’s a pretty neat piece of technology. From what I understand, the main unit attaches to the bottom of a Super Famicom console, plus it always has its own cartridge for the cartridge slot. It allowed owners to download games and content from satellite broadcasts! Sutte Hakkun started out as a game for this service, and its own history is a little complicated. With it being a level-based game, it started out with a few dozen levels for the initial Satellaview version. Then Nintendo decided to make an expanded version for their “Nintendo Power” service (not to be confused with the popular magazine). That’s another thing I have to explain: in Japan, there were these writable Super Famicom cartridges you could get, and you could bring it to a local store to have a game downloaded onto it. And so, the second release of Sutte Hakkun was a downloadable version for these cartridges, and it had far more levels than the first release. And eventually, Nintendo decided to give it a full-on proper retail release, shown in the photo. By now it was 1999 when the system was almost totally dead, so it didn’t make a big splash.

Anyways, about the game itself! Sutte Hakkun is an action puzzle game. That is to say, you control a character who can move around freely, jump and take damage. But the levels aren’t like Mario-style platformer levels at all. You’re given a small area not much larger than a screen view, and your goal is to collect the rainbow shard(s), which will require some puzzle-solving. 

How do Sutte Hakkun’s puzzles work? Well your main character, Hakkun, has the ability to “suck” certain objects and absorb them, and then place them somewhere else. The main thing you’ll be sucking and placing are blocks, which you use to climb and reach places that you otherwise can’t. There are other objects that are a little different of course, but I’m not going into a detailed explanation of it all for this little post. But the thing I DO have to mention is the colors. Some levels will have an ink pot (or blocks that are already colored), and there are three different colors you can get: red, blue and yellow. Each one causes blocks (and some other thing I’m not explaining today) to move in a certain way! Injecting a block with red ink makes it move up and down, yellow ink makes it move diagonally, and blue ink makes it go left and right. These puzzles can get pretty darn complex, as you often need to do things in a pretty exact specific way, and set blocks moving so that they meet up with each other at a certain time. But it’s super fun and feels super rewarding to solve puzzles!

I discovered this game in my later teen years, and I greatly enjoyed it. I’ll probably never beat this game though, because it gets REALLY difficult as you progress. And I won’t look up a walkthrough, because for a puzzle game that completely defeats the purpose of playing it. Now, the game does have a hint system. But using a hint will not give away the whole puzzle solution. And it will PERMANENTLY reduce your score for that level, if that’s something you care about. Not only that, but the game will literally shame you for using hints. There will even be text on the file select screen hint-shaming you!

Sutte Hakkun might be my favorite game that I will (probably) never beat. It’s a sheer delight for anyone who enjoys solving puzzles. It’s rather perplexing to me that this game has never seen a rerelease, and I really hope it does at some point because more people need to experience it. Until thin, it’s another…uh…”Japansential”, I guess. I want a clever word for Japanese games, and I guess that’s the best I got.