When I was ten years old, I stole a foam sword from a LARP camp where I went with my Boy Scout troop. We don’t have the hours needed to unpack all that information, but please know that, when I got home, I immediately set to work on returning the sword with an apology note. Yes, stealing is wrong and I was a bastard, but the sword also wasn’t nearly as fun by itself, in my house, with parents telling me not to hit things or people. The atmosphere is often a key ingredient to having the most amount of fun: a five hour long game of Risk is great with friends, awful with your brother’s drunk college roommate. It’s the atmospheric temperature that I didn’t consider when I eagerly received my review copy of All You Need Is Help, and, sadly, found it lacking from my initial experience.

All You Need Is Help is a four player cooperative puzzle party game from Q-Games Ltd, and it was one of the stars of my last trip to BitSummit. My daughter ended up replaying this twee puzzle game a remarkable five times, each time patiently waiting in line for others to finish so she could sit down and have a go at it. Twice, I also participated, so I feel like I got a really good idea of what the game was like on both Playstation and XBox. Taking on the guise of one of four little animals (and an additional four available in the DLC), players must work together to accomplish the goal of each level. Sometimes you’re making a shape with your bodies, sometimes you’re corralling a giant ball, and, eventually, you might even end up in a 2v2 sporting event, like a massive game of foosball.

Most of the time, however, you’ll be getting ready to hit switches and make shapes, like this.

The demo of All You Need Is Help was situated as a three game run, allowing players to get a good feel for what happens within and how things are mechanically inclined. Movement was strictly limited to single joystick input, with no ability to turn, only to move in a strafing manner. The secret sauce for this game is that you need to use other players in order to pivot, which, given that a majority of the levels focus on making shapes, is crucial to obtaining a victory. While this might seem very simple, it’s a smart way to ensure there’s a bonus to playing in a couch co-op way: being able to voice what you’d like others to do means faster victories. It also encourages people to use Discord when playing online, since we’re about to sunset on the Switch and still have almost no support for voice.

SInce the demo is very much a controlled environment, I wasn’t surprised that the full game is a bit different. First and foremost, there isn’t an end game or limit to speak of in terms of playing. The beginning, middle and end is “do puzzles with friends to get coins.” After several hours of playing with family and strangers online, I can confidently say that I understand the gist of the game, and it’s a pick up and play party puzzler through and through. The game expands the more you play, with some of the more engaging levels not being made available until after someone in the party has played at least a couple of stamp cards worth. Stamp cards are filled by getting things from the gumball machine in the center of the lobby, each pull is a hundred coins, and you get 60-70 for completing a puzzle.

Oh boy! I spent my coins on…a nickname! That I paid for! And none of the characters are dogs! Awesome!

Probably the most jarring surprise with All You Need Is Help is the complete lack of solo activity. The developers have hopefully added a mode where a player can toggle between playing two characters with a switch-off mode, but that still means you need at least one person to join you in order to make the game work. Naturally, you could pair a bunch of Joycons to your Switch and just do it alone, and I did in order to get a couple of screenshots to make sure this review was fully explored. I have to admit it had all the fun and excitement of beating myself at Monopoly, but it did give the bonus of grinding coins in a fluent manner.

While the game is very cute, the aesthetics fit best in the visuals. The animals are all cubic and adorable, with plenty of accessories to help change up what your character looks like. Some basic things like glasses or head bows are available from the start, and gradually unlocking mustaches, party hats and different colored name plates means allowing even more customization. The idea is that you’ll constantly be playing this with others, and sometimes everyone wants to be Scratch the Cat, so a little flair can differentiate you more than just the colors.

The satisfaction that comes from all pigs, all the time.

Additionally, the entire game is built in a style that most evokes the arts and crafts style design of some of the most beloved Nintendo titles. When I immediately think of Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Woolly World, the idea becomes something very cozy and comforting. For the most part, that’s what you get in All You Need is Help, from the different accessories to the world itself. The one and only exception is the ball that you occasionally push around, simply because devs decided to slap a face on it that changes expressions constantly and, at times, is a bit off putting. And by off putting, I mean it grimaces and smirks like something highly inappropriate is going on. It was funny when I was playing with my wife or online strangers, but it felt weird with my kids.

However, the attempts to make an equally cute soundtrack results in All You Need is Help becoming a serious headache, aurally. The guitar and light chanting gives you the impression that Zooey Deschanel moved to Stars Hollow and is actively making a cult. It’s too saccharine and repetitive, and the constant voiced proclamations from the characters do nothing to soothe the tonality. It’s theoretically sweet, but it is so overdone that it makes my temporal lobe throb just thinking about it. You can very easily play the game with no sound on, so go ahead and mute the game whenever you’re ready.

Scratch the cat has no social awareness, we are under a time crunch, GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME.

As for the game itself…All You Need is Help is a title where you’re going to need to be patient and dedicated. There’s a lot of fun to be had in different modes, especially thinking puzzles that are more complex and mazes that require cooperation. But those stages aren’t going to present themselves early on. Instead, you’ll get a lot of the same in terms of the same four puzzles and, on occasion, a ball rolling exercise. I’m not exaggerating when I say it took until my twentieth time playing a round with online strangers till I finally found something “new,” and I don’t know if that means I unlocked it or they had already unlocked it and were sharing. It wasn’t clear and I didn’t care, because now I was grappling with the online aspect.

Q-Games did a smart thing by making sure their title was totally cross-play accessible, as it takes the meager player pool across all platforms and combines in them in a way that makes the lobby always ready. It also meant that I knew people on PC, Xbox and Playstation 4 or 5 were dealing with the same bugs that I was. Sometimes the lobby doesn’t acknowledge when you’ve chimed in and thus delays the games’ start. Sometimes the latency caused me to travel a couple blocks beyond where I wanted to be, resulting in frustration on everyone’s part. More than once it seemed that I glitched and was moving a totally different way than I anticipated, which caused confusion.

The blue pig, who is clearly a cat, is checked in but not checked in. Technology!

This was only further exacerbated by the fact that not all 3rd party controllers have ideal support. I had a solid effort with my official JoyCons and my 8bitdo Pro, but there was a huge separation for my MayFlash-S, which is my go-to for using my WiiU Pro Controller (one of my favorites). All You Need is Help is the first game I’ve played where, for reasons beyond me, it could only track one axis on the joystick, resulting in me not even being able to leave the room corral to start the game. While this is an incredibly niche issue, I also realize that first party controllers are terribly expensive and, for people trying to get four players together, you need to sometimes use whatever’s available. My “whatever’s available” didn’t work, resulting in a lot of disappointment from the playerbase (kids who wanted to hurry up and puzzle).

When all is said and done, All You Need is Help is cute and welcoming, but can be quite repetitive and directionless. It’s the epitome of a party puzzler: incredibly simple to pick up, play and enjoy. It’ll get you a few minutes of joy, and you’ll probably want to get it when you return home so you can recapture that excitement. Yet, if you do, be sure to always have friends on hand or a good online connection, because solo play will simply never be a part of this game’s future. Yes, you do need help, but all you really need is someone else to play with.

All You Need is Help is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of All You Need is Help was provided by the publisher.