Retro Review: Chip’s Challenge

Reviewed Platform: Windows

Release Year: 1989

Chip’s Challenge is a puzzle video game where you’re tasked with collecting chips (the computer kind, not the potato kind) and completing challenges on a series of levels. Whilst not obvious, it does have a story: You’re the nerd Chip McCallahan, who met a girl called Melinda The Mental Marvel in a science lab, and you want to gain entry to the exclusive Bit Buster Club. To do so, you must navigate through Melinda’s Clubhouse, a set of puzzles with increasingly difficulty. Don’t ask me, it was the late 80s. Probably sounded plausible at the time.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, Chip’s Challenge is all about the puzzles. Each level starts you out with a certain number of chips that you need to collect before you’re allowed to exit the level, typically within a certain amount of time. Pushing blocks, collecting keys, navigating mazes and dodging monsters are just some of the things you’ll find yourself regularly doing on your quest for those precious chips. You may think that it’s a simple affair, but in reality it’s quite deep and complex.

Some levels involve water, ice and fire, each of which you can navigate differently depending on collected items. Stepping straight into water and fire unprepared will instantly kill you, but pick up the flippers and the fire boots and you can navigate those areas to your heart’s content. Stepping on ice without skates will just send you flying, but once you’ve found them you can walk freely on the icy surfaces. There are moving floors, warp blocks, switch doors and more which you’ll need to navigate to complete each level.

Many of the level tasks you’ll be solving need to be completed in a specific order, which could lead to frustration in some cases. Push a block into the wrong place or pick up the items in the wrong order and it’s back to the beginning of the level for you. There’s a lot of variety though, with nearly 150 levels for you to make your way through. The hardcore CC players will play each one consecutively, but the vast majority will play the training levels before typing in random passwords to access those later on.

There’s quite a community, too. In the 20 years since launch the game has received its own following, with numerous programs allowing you to create your own levels and capture videos of your best speedruns and high scores. If the levels included aren’t your thing then just have a go at making your own or download some made by others. The standard ones start off easy but soon get you thinking, with more complex puzzles and tasks to complete. They’re not so hard you’ll be throwing your computer out of the window, instead providing a nice, progressive challenge.

There’s not much I can really say here, other than there’s a lot of grey going on. The floor tiles are grey, the walls are grey, the chips are grey and Chip’s little shoes are grey; obviously an inspiration for the colour palette of Gears of War 3. Colour coded keys provide some much needed variety, along with some other environmental objects. The fire is red, the water is blue and the ice is a light blue, so yeah, there’s your colour. As for the animations, there’s not much I can say about that, either. When Chip moves he slides about in a Superman pose, and the enemies just seem to move around without any animation at all.

Like looping midi tracks? Great, you’ve come to the right place. CC offers two tracks to eventually make your ears bleed, cunningly titled CHIP01 and CHIP02 (on my version, anyway, they may be called chips01 and chips02  on other versions to spice things up). Either way, you’ll soon be switching it off and listening to something else whilst solving your puzzles. I did always prefer CHIP02, though; it’s quite catchy for the first few minutes but gets old by the hundredth time you’ve heard it.

Overall, Chip’s Challenge isn’t a bad little puzzle game. It’s simple on the surface but once you get stuck in it has all the elements of a classic puzzler. Good for both short blasts and extended plays there’s a lot on offer with it, so if puzzles are your thing there’s no reason why you shouldn’t try it out. Just don’t forget to mute the sound.