Putty – System 3 - 1992 - First time playing?: Yes!

Putty is a game that's so damn weird that I'm not even sure how to introduce it. I guess I could just name the kinds of things you'll encounter in Putty to give you an idea of what to expect. A gun-wielding carrot that wears sunglasses. A wizard that flashes you and shoots fireballs out of his dick. A cockatrice that lays eggs that hatch into tiny sumo wrestlers that explode. Putty is an absolute fever dream, plain and simple. I’m aware that such statements are usually spoken by people who have zero imagination and are insecure about showing genuine glee at joyful concepts such as creativity and uniqueness, and I also always roll my eyes at such comments along the lines of “they must have been on drugs when they made this.” Putty however? Well, I haven’t found a source for this quote so it could be fabricated, but I have seen it copypasted on both a Youtube comments section as well as an Imgur post, so…

Yeah. Literal food poisoning and alcohol induced fever dream. If anyone can find a source for this quote, please let me know.

The story is… okay, let me try and summarise. I’m not sure if I can do justice to the narrative masterpiece of Putty. All of the putties live on Putty Moon that orbits Planet Zid, but then a wizard called Dazzledaze and his cat called Dweezil invade and capture absolutely every single putty on this entire moon except for Billy Putty. Dazzledaze does not want to use the putties as ingredients for magic spells or anything else wizardly, but instead just wants to sell them to earth as chewing gum. He’s an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that also steals human babies and turns them into mutant monster henchmen with his wizard magic. See, this is biting social commentary actually on how earthlings will still keep buying products from corporations and industry giants who are widely known for using child sweatshops. Then some robots crash land their UFOs on Putty Moon and Billy drops everything to prioritise rescuing the bots before the putties in case they’d be willing to help him overthrow the wizard as a favour afterwards.

So, how do you play as a Putty? A putty can do many things. It can walk left and right and jump, and certain enemies can be defeated by jumping on them, but that's boring. The cooler way of getting around as a putty is by stretching left, right, up and down. If your body can stretch far enough to reach the surface of another platform, you can then pull your entire mass up onto that platform. It's quick, precise and safe, so it's worth using wherever it's applicable. Heck, it’s even faster than walking.

If you hold down the stretch button and do a short, quick joystick flick either left or right, Putty will manifest a giant fist to punch enemies with. It works… uh, sometimes. Depending on the enemy. Sometimes you’re better off just repeatedly flicking the joystick down while holding the stretch button, which instead causes Billy Putty to inflate and eventually explode, killing nearly every enemy on screen, though at the cost of a chunk of your health.

Perhaps the most important mechanic however is absorption. When holding the joystick down, Billy will turn into a puddle on the floor and absorb anything he can above him. When you absorb a bot, it remains safely tucked away in your body, so you can carry it through the level and drop it off at the level exit, with each level having a set number of bots you’re required to rescue before you can continue, generally 2-4 bots per level. Absorbed bots can still take damage from projectile attacks that piece through Putty’s goopy body, so you need to be careful around any gun-wielding enemies for instance. You can also absorb human babies. No, you don't save the babies, don't be silly. Nah, Billy just eats them. They enter his body and never exit his body, which only has the capacity to hold one baby-sized bot at a time. They melt away into nothing in his body, giving him extra health. You better eat the babies fast however, because if you don't then they explode and then the cat bursts through the screen and points and laughs at you, and can your ego really take that hit?

"Too bad, juuust missed it! Ahahahaha!" - Dweezil the Cat

Here's an exchange that happened between me and my girlfriend while explaining the baby eating mechanics to her.

MSX: What the hell is this game?

My vampiric queen: Based.

She's a witch, by the way, so eating babies is a way of life for her. You get used to the screaming eventually when you live with this. (She actually is a pagan witch IRL and she gave me permission to make this joke.)

The vibe Putty seems to be going for is that of a Tex Avery MGM/Warner Brothers cartoon, right down to the Dweezil’s mocking voice clip being ripped from a Screwy Squirrel short, but it's mixed in with this more absurdist, surreal style of British humour that's somewhat dissonant from the intended vibe of the game, which in the end is part of what makes it so compellingly weird. Bugs Bunny did a lot of cruel and unusual things across his wide filmography, but he never ate an exploding baby. I also get a kick out of the previously mentioned wizard flasher with fireball dickblasts. That’s not just a wizard, that’s the wizard, Dazzledale himself. He just shows up in the second world of the game out of six without any fanfare, indecently exposes himself and then immediately leaves. I love it.

For me personally, while I genuinely love Putty’s utterly bizarre premise and sense of humour, the game is absolutely killed by the controls. The wide moveset that Billy Putty has is a hell of a lot to work into a control scheme that uses a joystick and a single button, and although it can be annoying to accidentally stretch when I meant to punch, that's personally the least of my issues. Instead, my main issue is the heavy input latency. Push the joystick left or right and Billy Putty will move in that direction, uh, when he feels like it. Usually half a second later or so. What's especially odd about this is that jumping doesn't have any latency whatsoever. There is a cool down animation after Billy lands a jump that prevents you from moving until that animation ends, but there's a clear reason behind that delay that's conveyed via that animation of Billy briefly jiggling as he regains his footing after landing a jump. That's not the case with the latency with walking left and right, as even when Billy is idling and ready to respond to jumping inputs instantly, he still takes half a second to move along the floor.

The result of this is simply that Putty doesn't really feel good to play. In general, it's a fast moving and chaotic game, so it's frustrating when you're soaking up damage from aggressive swarms of enemies, owing to the lack of any kind of knock back or invincibility frames after taking damage, and Billy just sits there taking it until half a second after you tell him to get the hell out of there. I can usually take my losses in games pretty well, but Putty? To put it as my girlfriend did; “That game brought something out of you that I’ve seen no other game do. It was getting to you.” The irritation and devastation spurred on by any game over hit me to an extent I am not used to. It’s far from one of the hardest games I’ve played, only taking a few days of practice to master, but it’s one of the more irritating ones for sure.

With that said, you can play Putty slower and more strategically, which is more or less a necessity due to Billy Putty’s sluggishness. Namely, Putty’s exploding ability is extremely powerful and frequently the better and safer option than attempting to take on the enemies head-on. Yeah, you lose a chunk of health every time you use it, but clearing out the entire screen is invaluable and can also help deal with the heavy damage dealing and awkwardly placed enemies that are more risky than it’s worth to fight directly, especially when using it grants you easier access to healing items that undo the damage caused. Furthermore, in spite of the small size of the levels, they do have a decent amount of branching paths which allows you to bypass sections you may be struggling with. I was really struggling with the final level of Toytown for instance, filled with trains that do such rapid damage that they’re practically instant kills, as well as fast moving toy trains that damage your held bots, but then I realised that there’s a platform behind the first train that you can stretch up onto in order to get up to the higher levels, which also allows you to stay out of the way of the kids that drop toy trains on you on the other side of the screen.

The level design in general is somewhat puzzley. There’s typically a trick to each level and each enemy that will likely take some deaths to figure out, but the game is actually pretty easy when you know what you’re doing and are not completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies and projectiles on screen at once. It’s tricky to get to that point of course, due to limited lives and continues and the threat of having to go back to the start of the game if you run out, but Putty isn’t the longest game in the world, with a complete run being roughly 50 minutes or so, so it’s not too bad.

Furthermore, levels are filled with secrets and power-ups to help make things easier as well. Temporary invincibility, the ability to carry more than one bot at a time, warps to the top and bottom of the levels, an orb that summons Uncle Ted in who distracts the enemies with his DJing, yeah this game never stops being weird. You can also find hidden elevators that greatly cut down on excessive backtracking, as these are secondary exits that you can drop the bots off at in order to rescue them, generally positioned much closer to the bots spawning points than the primary exit.

One of the things that makes Putty so difficult to get the hang of at first is the way the mechanics radically shift over the course of the game. Every time you reach a new world, you’re basically having to relearn the game all over again. For instance, from world 3 onwards, enemies no longer drop babies upon defeat, which means there’s far less healing items for you to rely on. World 3 also marks a shift in how the bots are handled, as now they’re actively hopping around the levels and occasionally laughing maniacally to themselves as they jump off cliffs and die. The exits from this point on are also placed at the bottom of the level as opposed to the top of the level, with the bots typically spawning in at the top of the level and thus requiring you to climb up to the top, grab a bot and then ferry it back down to the bottom of the level.

Of course, new enemies are also introduced as you progress through the game, and figuring out how to fight all of them is yet another case of trial and error. Some enemies can be punched, some enemies can’t. Some enemies can be absorbed, some enemies can’t. Some enemies can be jumped on, some enemies can’t. You get the picture. Every time you run into a new enemy you’ll need to test every single attack on it to figure out what does or doesn’t work, and likely soak up a lot of damage in the process. Enemies also start doing faster and faster damage as the game progresses, which means that trying the wrong kind of attack on them may leave you open to an attack that drains your health to 0 in less than a second.

It gets even more complex with the introduction of the morph power. Billy can take the form of some things he absorbs, such as rabbits, fireworks launchers and an entire black hole, and certain enemies can only be defeated by using those morphed forms. For instance, world 3 has these giant red slime enemies that prey on rabbits. They’re invincible to most of your attacks other than exploding, but if you need to kill them without taking damage, what you need to do is find a rabbit, absorb it before the red slimes get to it, morph into the shape of the rabbit you just ate and then wait for a red slime to eat you, after which Billy automatically inflates himself and bursts the red slime apart from the inside. That’s… a lot of steps and a lot of risks. The rapid contact damage these red slimes deal can be enough to essentially one-shot you, and getting to the rabbits before they do puts you at risk of being killed by them, but then you also need to make the leap in logic that if you turn into a bunny and be entirely enveloped by this creature that deals contact damage, this way you’ll actually take no damage and also kill the red slime as well.

In general, the morph abilities feel better suited to a game with more responsive controls and a more nimble player character. They’re typically finicky and a hassle to obtain in the first place, as absorbing hostile enemies is far trickier than just punching or jumping on them. Then when you do get the cool fireworks launching ability, you end up wasting it because it turns out you can only shoot the fireworks to the right side of the screen, not the left side, and several enemies that can be one-shotted by punches are inexplicably completely unaffected by the fireworks. They’re a really cool idea, but damn near useless in execution as nearly everything they achieve can be more efficiently and safely accomplished by either punching, jumping, exploding or just avoiding the enemy entirely.

The same goes for other abilities such as inflating to cushion the fall of bots that jump off cliffs to their death. You can save them this way, but it’s tricky to time due to how slow inflating is, as well as the fact that if you inflate too fast you’ll explode. You also have a button combination that allows you to make a cup of coffee, yes really, which distracts the bots and prevents them from waltzing into danger. This also isn’t that useful as bots respawn pretty quickly if they die anyway, so you can just wait at the spawn point and absorb them as soon as they come back.

I feel like this is reflective of Putty as a whole. It’s a lot of cool and creative ideas that have a ton of potential, but are neither executed particularly well nor well thought out. If you’re after a puzzle platformer that explores the potential abilities of a blobby protagonist, there’s other later games that I feel have taken the premise further such as Mercury Meltdown or Tales From Space About a Blob. Nonetheless, Putty was an early take on the concept, and to this day you’re unlikely to find a take on the concept quite as bizarre as it, which I think warrants at least a bewildered glance. I don’t particularly like playing Putty, but I have this weird appreciation of it that hasn’t faded even after making it to the final level with only one bot left to rescue and game overing, forcing me to start the whole thing all over. I’d rather a game be interesting than boring, and Putty utterly fascinates me both in its bizarre design philosophies and incoherent setting and characters.

Hey, wait a second, does the HUD in this screenshot say I need to rescue 93 bots in this level?

Well, case and point. I’m fascinated by how the hell that happened in this level where you are supposed to only need to rescue three bots to win it. (I believe this was an overflow bug, caused by two bots reaching the exit elevator at the same time when I only had to rescue one more bot to win the level, thus causing the ‘OUT’ counter to skip 0 and roll over straight to 99. I’m not 100% certain however.)

Putty was later released on the SNES under the name Super Putty. Having a quick glance at it, it’s clearly the more polished version of the game. It runs at a higher framerate, has none of the input latency issues of the Amiga original and even has a brand new in-game soundtrack, in contrast to Putty on Amiga having no music except for the title screen. It is quite a bit harder however, due to tweaks such as the game running faster and babies not refilling your health upon eating them. Pick your poison, I guess.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 28th December 2025