Push Me Pull You is a multiplayer wrestling game about wrestling and friendship, or at least that’s what it said in the game description, and it’s really quite weird. Seriously, this game is so weird you could probably consider it disturbing, to an extent. On top of being incredibly bizarre, Push Me Pull You is an incredibly confusing, yet hilarious experience, and one of the most unique games that I’ve played in a good while.
In Push Me Pull You, you take control of a two-headed human worm thing. Remember CatDog? Well, it’s like that, but if CatDog was two people. Yeah, I know. Your goal is to attempt to prevent your opponent from keeping a small red ball inside their half of the court for long enough to score a point. Yeah, I really have no idea what’ going on – the game just sort of threw me in the deep end, and I was essentially drowning from that point onwards.
I think it’s going to be pretty hard to convey what Push Me Pull You is actually about through the means of this review. I’ve played the game for a decent while and I still don’t really know what’s going on, but let’s just keep going.
Like I said, you control a two-headed worm thing and you do this by controlling each half individually with their respected half of your controller. Sounds simple, right? It’s really not. This game is seriously hard to control. It’s probably me, but I just couldn’t get the hang of controlling both halves of my character and actually getting it to do what I needed to do. I’d always end up getting wrapped around myself (that sounds weirder than I thought it would), or stuck around the opposing worm guy.
I don’t think it’s just me though. The person that I sat and played Push Me Pull You with suffered with the same frustration of the character just not controlling in the ways they wanted it to, and this often ended up with the both of us just getting bored of both of our characters not really doing much, other than flail around the ball and get stuck on each other. It may be a case of practice makes perfect, but even after playing for a prolonged amount of time, I just couldn’t get the knack of the way this game controlled. Not being able to control the game as intended was, as I’m sure you can understand, frustrating as I really feel that this put a damper on the overall experience that Push Me Pull You had to offer; frequently getting bored whilst playing a game that looked like stupendous fun from the screenshots and trailers was a significant disappointment to me.
I’ve already mentioned that Push Me Pull You is confusing, hilarious, and unique, but I’ve also said that my second player and I ended up getting bored frequently — let’s talk about that.
Push Me Pull You is hilarious because of just how ridiculous it looks. Just look at it; you control two people joined at the waist that face off against another pair of wrestlers joined at the waist. At first glance the game looks like mindless fun but, after spending a good few hours with this, what would seem a weird and wonderful game becomes a bit repetitive. I don’t think I expected any more, to be honest. It’s a party game that’s meant to be played in short bursts.
The problem I have is just how quick the repetition started to kick in. After just a few matches, maybe five or-so, I would find that my player and I would get bored, which isn’t a bad thing straight away as there’s a couple of different game modes for players to choose from. Greedy is a mode where instead of playing with one ball, you play with three. The more the merrier, I guess. In Knockout, your goal is to keep your ball safe while hindering the status of the opposing team’s ball. And then there’s Sleepy Time, the mode that I found to be the most fun; as it’s designed for two players, each player loses control of one half of their worm as it falls asleep, leaving it as effective as a snapped elastic band. Sleepy Time was fun and a lot less frustrating that the other game modes, making it the one me and my partner had the most fun with. Oh, it’s not a big deal, but I should probably mention that the game modes are called variants, which is fitting because, as you could probably tell from the brief descriptions I game, they aren’t precisely new modes, but just a variation on the default formula.
I had a look at the presskit on developer House House’s website and found that the team dedicated a whole part of the description just to say ‘it’s gross’. This game really is gross, and the thing that really makes this game gross is both the characters and the sound. I’ve already gone on about the characters being weird worm/people-hybrids, so let’s have a little talk about the sound.
When it comes to the sound in Push Me Pull You, it just adds to the weird factor. Like, get this: when you’re playing, there’s absolutely no sound other than the sounds of your characters’ palms scatting around the floor. It’s weird, man. Watching these peculiar worm people scurry around the screen with nothing but the noise of extremely fast footsteps (handsteps? I’m losing the will to live here) is, whilst being initially funny, a tad bit uncomfortable; it’s funny, but it’ll leave you and whomever you’re playing it with exclaiming the word “ew” on multiple occasions. Ew. However, the sound effects aren’t bad and they do just the job that they needed to. They’re still really weird though. Oh man, ew.
Even though I found the gameplay a little bit too complicating, the complete opposite can be said when it comes to the visuals of Push Me Pull You. The entire game is presented in a very simplistic way, with everything from the menu screen to the worm wrestling action appearing is if it was all totally flat. It looks really, really good. The pastel colors work really well with the flat visuals, giving the game a very basic and calming aesthetic which was nice. Imagine if the game was released with more realistic visuals? I wouldn’t have dared step foot near this thing.
However, with the simplistic visuals working an absolute treat for Push Me Pull You, I think that’s where developers House House needed to stop with the theme of simplicity. Aside from the control being a bit complicated, everything else about the game is almost a bit too minimalist. The game modes are very similar to one-another. The music is pretty much non-existent for the most part, aside from the little ukulele jingle that plays on the main menu. The game even boasted character customization, but other than being able to change the skin color, hair color and hairstyle, that’s literally all you can do. I don’t know how I expected to customize my worm-guy, but with the feature being so minimal, it may as well not be there.
Push Me Pull You is a game like no other. It’s an absolutely ridiculous concept, which leads to a good few laughs with a couple of friends but don’t expect too much from it. If you can overcome the daunting task of controlling the game, I think you’ll enjoy it. Like I said, it’s fun, but only in short bursts. The lack of variety in the game modes is the main offender when it comes to the fall of Push Me Pull You. It’s almost like a multiplayer version of Noby Noby Boy, if you ever played that; it’s just a weird and wonderful game that burns out quickly if you play it too much.
Oh, and there’s a dog mode that I stumbled upon by complete accident. Woof.