Chuchel

Amanita Design has spent nearly two decades building a reputation as the animation studio that happens to ship games. Machinarium gave us melancholy robots. Botanicula gave us whimsical flora. Samorost gave us gnomes on space debris. CHUCHEL, released in 2018, is the studio finally admitting what it always wanted to be: a cartoon studio with a mouse cursor.

The premise is gloriously stupid. You are Chuchel — a grumpy, screaming ball of black fluff wearing an orange acorn cap — and someone keeps stealing your cherry. Sometimes it’s Kekel, your rat-like rival. Sometimes it’s a giant disembodied hand descending from the heavens like an Old Testament prank. Your job, across a string of self-contained scenes, is to get the cherry back. You will fail repeatedly, and the failures are the point.

Market positioning here is unusual and worth being honest about. This is not an adventure game competing with Return of the Obra Dinn or even Amanita’s own Machinarium. It’s a comedy delivery mechanism priced like a game, and a short one. That framing has consequences: the recurring complaint among desktop buyers is length and triviality, while the mobile audience tends to intuitively get what this is — a premium, mobile-native experience in a marketplace drowning in free-to-play sludge.

The pedigree backs it up. CHUCHEL took Excellence in Visual Art at IGF 2018 and Best Game for Children at Anifilm the same year. That dual recognition — indie art-game credibility and children’s media award — tells you exactly what Amanita built: a Pixar short you can touch. One housekeeping note for Nintendo owners: a Switch port was announced for 2022 and quietly never materialized. Don’t wait for it.

• Bite-sized vignettes: Each scene is a self-contained gag, puzzle, or mini-game lasting a few minutes. The structure means zero filler — when a joke lands, the game moves on rather than milking it.
• Affectionate arcade parodies: Pac-Man, Tetris, and other classics get filtered through Amanita’s hand-drawn absurdism. These are the game’s best moments — recognition humor executed with genuine craft.
• DVA’s soundtrack and sound design: The Czech band scores every squawk, boing, and tantrum. The audio isn’t accompaniment; it’s half the comedy engine, functioning like a live foley artist reacting to every tap.
• A hint system that eliminates friction: Stuck for more than a minute? A built-in walkthrough is one tap away. Amanita clearly decided that frustration is the enemy of comedy and designed accordingly.

The Gameplay Loop, Such As It Is

Let’s be precise about what you actually do in CHUCHEL: you tap things. You tap creatures, mushrooms, eggs, Kekel, and Chuchel himself, and the world reacts with expressive, escalating slapstick. The “puzzles” are rarely puzzles in any meaningful sense — they’re interaction sequences where the solution is usually “click everything until the cartoon advances.” Adventure game veterans will solve most scenes on instinct.

This is either the game’s fatal flaw or its central design achievement, depending on what you walk in expecting. We’d argue it’s the latter, and here’s why: comedy is a timing medium, and difficulty destroys timing. A gag that lands after a long stretch of confused pixel-hunting isn’t a gag anymore; it’s a relief. Amanita understood that the traditional adventure game loop — try, fail, consult walkthrough, resent designer — is structurally incompatible with slapstick. So they gutted the challenge and kept the reactivity. Every click produces something: a squeal, a transformation, a small betrayal. The game trains experimentation not because experimentation is required, but because it’s consistently rewarded with new animation.

Chuchel Himself Is the Mechanic

The real innovation isn’t in the puzzle design — it’s in the protagonist as comedic instrument. Chuchel is a fully realized character in the Looney Tunes tradition: petty, obsessive, easily enraged, and endlessly abused by his environment. He screams at obstacles. He sulks when ignored. He performs a victory dance so smug you’ll want the cherry stolen again just to watch him deflate. The player’s relationship to him is closer to a cartoon director’s than a hero’s — you’re not embodying Chuchel, you’re provoking him, and the game’s best interactions exploit that distance. Clicking on Chuchel when there’s nothing to do produces some of the funniest idle animations in the medium.

The Mini-Game Interludes

The parody sequences — a Pac-Man maze rendered in Amanita’s biological grotesquerie, a Tetris riff, several best left unspoiled — do real structural work. They break up the tap-and-watch rhythm before it can go stale, and they’re pitched at exactly the right difficulty: playable by a six-year-old, charming to a forty-year-old. None overstays its welcome. This restraint is rarer than it should be; a lesser studio would have padded each mini-game into a five-minute obligation to justify the runtime.

Where It Falls Short

The honest critique: CHUCHEL’s structure is a joke-delivery treadmill, and around the two-thirds mark, the formula shows. Cherry appears, cherry is stolen, absurd obstacle, resolution, repeat. The individual gags stay strong, but the narrative stakes never escalate — there’s no equivalent of Machinarium’s melancholy undertow to give the comedy contrast. And with a brief runtime and near-zero replay value, the price asks you to value this like a movie ticket, not a game. That’s a fair ask, but it’s an ask, and it’s the main reason this lands as a recommendation for the right audience rather than a universal one.

One accessibility footnote that matters: the original release drew criticism for Chuchel’s black-fluff-and-red-lips design, and Amanita — to their credit — redesigned the character post-launch, shifting his coloring. The studio listened and acted. That responsiveness deserves mention.

This is where the IGF jury got it right. CHUCHEL is frame-for-frame the best-animated game Amanita has produced, and Amanita’s floor is most studios’ ceiling. The art direction trades Machinarium’s rusty melancholy for flat, saturated color fields — mustard yellows, hot pinks, void blacks — that read instantly on a phone screen and look like gallery prints on a monitor. Every creature has weight, squash, and stretch. The hand-drawn animation doesn’t cut corners on in-betweens; reactions cascade through characters’ whole bodies.

DVA’s audio work is inseparable from the visuals and deserves equal billing. The soundtrack lurches from jazz skronk to electronic burble to nonsense vocalization, and the sound design gives every interaction a tactile pop. Headphones recommended.

Technically, there’s little to fault on paper. The game is a 2D cartoon of modest scope, and it’s built to be light on hardware — the kind of title that should run comfortably on older phones and modest desktops alike. When your game is a cartoon, dropped frames are unforgivable; the design leaves little room for them.

CHUCHEL was clearly designed with touch in mind, and it shows — in a good way, for once.

• iOS and Android are the definitive versions. The entire interaction model is tapping and prodding, which maps one-to-one onto a fingertip. There’s a physical intimacy to poking Chuchel on a touchscreen that a cursor can’t replicate — you’re literally jabbing the little guy. The premium price on mobile (no ads, no IAP, no manipulation) makes it an easy recommendation in either store, particularly for parents handing a tablet to a child.
• Steam works in principle — a mouse is a perfectly serviceable poking implement, and the flat art style should scale beautifully to a large display, which flatters the animation. But the desktop context subtly miscasts the game. Sitting at a battlestation for a short interactive cartoon feels like watching a short film in an IMAX you paid full price for. It’s the same content; the couch-and-tablet framing simply fits better.
• Switch — doesn’t exist, despite the 2022 announcement. A shame, because the hybrid form factor would have been ideal.

CHUCHEL knows exactly what it is, and that self-awareness is its greatest strength. Amanita didn’t accidentally make an easy adventure game; they deliberately made an interactive cartoon and had the discipline to strip out everything — difficulty, length, friction — that would get between you and the next laugh. Judged as a puzzle game, it’s slight, and the thin runtime caps how far it can go. Judged as a short burst of hand-crafted Czech absurdism you can poke, it does exactly what it sets out to do. We recommend it to the right audience: buy it on a touchscreen, hand it to a kid or your own inner one, and let the cherry chase begin.