Can you ever really have Enough Plumbers?

When you think about it, the concept of extra lives is pretty fucked up. You die, and an exact copy of you is reborn a short time before you kicked it, raising all kinds of philosophical questions about the nature of choice and alternate realities. Enough Plumbers explores the extra lives concept in a manner remarkably similar to this hacked Super Mario World level. Albeit with marginally less tooth-grinding frustration.



You begin with one (Blue! Totally different!) plumber in a world of platforming tropes old as I am. There is a flag, your goal is to reach the flag. A bunch of bad guys and their unpleasant architecture want to stop you from reaching the flag. Pretty basic Flash-game stuff. But when you grab one of the ubiquitous floating coins, it doesn't add itself to your inventory and eventually buy you brief sweet immortality. Instead, it morphs over the course of a couple of seconds into another you, the price of life having been driven way down by recent economic turmoil. You control all of your proxy-plumbers with the same keys, and allowing your doppelgangers to die heinously is a key gameplay mechanic. As long as one plumber survives to reach the flag, the level is beaten. Scattered around the levels are various power-ups which turn one of your assembled masses into pipefitter golems, blimps and moonwalkers, helping or hindering their progress towards the flag and victory. The resulting gameplay is platformer puzzles rife with the shrill death-cries of Italian stereotypes.



The core is novel enough, and the puzzles are ingenious, if hewing a bit close to their origins for comfort. While crowding your Plumbers together into a single mass is generally the wisest course of action (which is a pity, since it kind of undermines the game's novelty by turning it into yet another single-protagonist puzzler), there are enough occasions when you have to split off and control two or three duplicates, often with powers altering where they can go and which environments will spell squeaky doom. Switching attention between copies (and forgetting about the welfare of a given self after it has served its purpose) is a vital skill for beating these levels, as well as your first step on the road to becoming a dissociative serial killer. The game's a bit on the short side, with only 25 levels, but better too short than wearing out its welcome (Besides which, any Flash game worth its salt has a sequel/level pack within a few months).



Overall, it's a fun distraction from the daily grind, which is the standard of accomplishment for any free Flash game. It might make you think about the assumptions we take for granted in our games, particularly in their treatment of life and death, but let's face it - Probably not, it's a fricking Flash game. And if you don't care for the branching possibilities offered by quantum immortality, there's always Free Will.