CHUCHEL

Introduction

CHUCHEL arrived on Steam on 7 March 2018, a comedy adventure from Amanita Design designed by Jaromír Plachý, who came to it after finishing Botanicula. A hairy little creature chases a single cherry across thirty short stages, helped and hindered by his rival Kekel. Almost everything on screen is hand-drawn animation; the soundtrack is credited to the Czech band DVA.

The tallies, as of 19 August 2026: Steam's label is Very Positive — 85% of 1,473 English reviews, 89% of 49 in the last thirty days, and 82.7% of roughly 4,000 across all languages (SteamDB snapshot). Critics land at Metacritic 81 and OpenCritic 80. On the numbers alone this is simply a well-made small thing.

Read the pool, though, and the disagreement is not about quality but about classification. The store copy promises "a set of original puzzles." The single most repeated sentence on the negative side is that these are not puzzles. The maker's word is being refused by the readers, and that one word is what I want to follow.

CHUCHEL — Steam store key art

First Impressions

Line up the most helpful positive reviews and the vocabulary is oddly physical: "a playable hug," an acid trip in the good sense, charming, whimsical, and simply "I laughed." The praise points not at a mechanism but at the reaction that comes back off the screen. The top-voted recommendation is one line long and contains only that hug.

The negative vocabulary is made of time instead: tedious, waiting, unskippable, and "one click triggers twenty or thirty seconds of animation." One critic sums the whole game up as disconnected challenges strung together like a series of demos, with many stretches amounting to dressed-up cutscenes.

What matters is that both sides are describing the same event. A click buys twenty seconds of animation. For one reader that is the reward; for the other it is the wait. Same design, same seconds — the fork is only in what the twenty seconds are payment for.

CHUCHEL — Steam store media asset

Putting the Mechanics into Words

Count the verbs and there is one: click. No movement, no inventory, no undo. Press somewhere and Chuchel does something and the stage advances a notch. In the vocabulary I use on this site, the subtraction of verbs has been taken about as far as it goes — and subtraction is something I have praised here many times.

The trouble is the grammar. A game that cuts down to one verb usually compensates with a hard rule: a pushed box cannot be pulled, a third colour turns the paint useless. Rules are what let a player reason about the next move. CHUCHEL supplies gags instead of rules, one per stage. Hence the negative refrain that nothing follows from anything and these are not puzzles — and hence even a favourable 7/10 conceding that parts run on trial and error. With no grammar carrying across stages, solutions are found rather than deduced.

Whether that is a flaw depends on what was being built. Plachý has described wanting an interactive cartoon with funny animation. Read it that way and the click is not a puzzle input at all but the shortest possible device for playing one animation after another. As I wrote about Little Inferno, a game with very few moves usually keeps its real subject just outside the moves. Here the subject is whatever appears after the press.

CHUCHEL — Steam store media asset

Pacing

Length is where the pool's numbers agree. Across the reviews I read, recorded playtimes cluster between 1.8 and 4.7 hours, with a median just under three; the game runs thirty stages. The negative side says the actual playing amounts to about two hours and does not satisfy. The positive side says two hours is fair at this price. The same two hours works as evidence of thinness and as justification of cost.

The sharper complaint is that cutscenes cannot be skipped — "completely unskippable," "way too long." The reasoning is easy to reconstruct: if the animation is the reward, a skip button is a button for throwing the reward away. But there is a cost. On a second pass, the same twenty seconds stops being a reward and becomes a toll, which is why the irritation concentrates among replayers and achievement hunters.

The phrase "learning curve" barely applies here, because no skill accumulates across stages. Thirty stages are not a slope; they are thirty short films laid side by side. The review that says the novelty ran out after thirty minutes is naming exactly that absence — and the review that praises the game for being episodic rather than plot-bound is describing the same structure from the other side.

CHUCHEL — Steam store media asset

Place in the Lineage

The proper nouns that recur most in this pool are not genre names but the studio's own back catalogue: Machinarium and Botanicula. The positive side invokes them as a guarantee — Amanita is still Amanita. The negative side invokes them as a substitute: if you are an adult who wants a point-and-click, buy Machinarium instead. Within the lineage, CHUCHEL sits on the branch where the puzzle weight is lightest, aiming at something quite different from a game like Creaks that is carried by the shape of its solutions.

The critic-versus-user split is worth a line. The scores agree: Metacritic 81, OpenCritic 80, Steam 82.7%. But OpenCritic's recommendation rate is 67% of twenty reviews, meaning a third of the press did not recommend it, against 17% negative on Steam. Identical numbers, more disagreement once the verdict is forced into a binary — plausibly because a reviewer on deadline has to decide what kind of game this is before writing, and that is the step people trip on.

One more layer sits in the pool. On 20 December 2018 Amanita changed the protagonist's body colour from black to orange, responding to concerns that the original design evoked blackface imagery; several stages were adjusted to match. Since then a share of the positive reviews contains defence rather than assessment. It is outside design criticism, but if the review pool is my material I should say plainly that this layer is part of the population.

CHUCHEL — Steam store media asset

Sources

This piece was written by reading the user reviews on the Steam store page as of 19 August 2026. No review text is quoted directly; typical claims are reconstructed.

- Steam: CHUCHEL (Very Positive; 85% of 1,473 English reviews, 89% of 49 in the last thirty days)

- Read via WebFetch: the ten most helpful positive reviews, the eight most helpful negative reviews and the five most recent — about twenty-three once duplicates are removed. The store's "About This Game" text and the summary labels were also used

- SteamDB: CHUCHEL (about 4,000 reviews across all languages, 82.7% positive) and Wikipedia: Chuchel (Metacritic 81, OpenCritic 80 with a 67% recommendation rate across twenty reviews, the 20 December 2018 colour change, and the thirty-stage structure)

- The images in the body are official assets served by the Steam store page itself; the image CDN was unreachable from the environment this piece was written in, so their contents could not be checked by eye and the captions are kept to the title and the asset type

Closing

Against Steam's 82.7% I give this a 7.0, judged as design. The craft is not in question: thirty stages of hand-drawn animation, with sound built to match, is an unusual density at this price. The single deduction is that no grammar carries across the stages. The verbs were subtracted to one, and nothing rule-shaped was put in the space that opened up — so the sensation of having solved something almost never comes back.

That makes it a question of range rather than of failure. It suits someone watching alongside a child, someone who came for the animation, someone who already knows Amanita's hand. It does not suit someone who came to buy resistance. Trace the negative reviews and most of the disappointment happens before purchase, at the moment of classification — which makes the store's own use of the word "puzzle" the costliest design decision in the whole package.

Two hours and the full force of hand-drawn animation, spent on a creature losing the same cherry thirty times. That much stands clear of the argument entirely.

CHUCHEL — Steam store key art