In search of an original puzzle game to while away the minutes while waiting on your bus or train to arrive? Grab the Bottle is here to fill that void, and it’s bringing elastic skin and elongating bones to the party.
Grab the Bottle is an interesting physics puzzle game where you guide a stretchy arm over and around many obstacles in pursuit of retrieving a bottle full of beverage. To justify the need for this convoluted Rube Goldberg approach to satisfying your thirst, we begin by controlling the arm of a baby from a crib trying to retrieve its bottle to nurse itself to sleep. Or, at the very least, contentedness. As we progress through each level, the challenges become gradually more difficult, and the scenery and types of bottle that we need to grab change to give us a sense of movement through the world. The game would otherwise start to feel incredibly repetitive, even for a puzzle game.
The biggest catch that I haven’t mentioned yet is that you must first retrieve all of the extra items before you recover your bottle, and this means that the quickest path to the bottle, which is often the most obvious, is not the solution to your problem. You will have to come at the items from a specific angle so as not to block off your future attempts to get at the bottle, and you must also avoid getting yourself trapped in a corner. You can manage to hit your hand a few times before you fail and must restart the level, but it was especially frustrating to learn that you could harm yourself from bumping into your serpentine arm. Grab the Bottle offers many unique configurations of items and obstacles, and you can play for quite some time without feeling like you are just going through the motions.
Unfortunately, what starts off as a novel premise and some clever puzzle design, simply wears too thin, too soon. The novelty of a fresh puzzle game is there, and the puzzles never really stop being clever…they just aren’t that enjoyable after a short period of time. This game is probably best suited to being played in five- ten minute bursts, and even then you should probably take a few days off between sessions to not allow the novelty to wear off. Grab the Bottle is a cleverly designed game, and fun in small doses…but doesn’t have the courtesy to not wear out its welcome.
