Puggsy

The gameplay is mostly a cross between a normal platform game, with the usual style of platformer enemies and a variety of means to kill them, and a puzzle game of sorts where Puggsy is often required to find objects, and either carry them to a specific location or somehow use them in order to complete levels. There are also a variety of objects that have power-up effects, such as allowing Puggsy to be hit once or twice without dying, speeding him up or making him temporarily invincible, and objects that while not necessary, can be temporarily helpful, such as a variety of guns (most of which have limited ammunition which can often not be refilled).

Objects react on a clever physics-based system, which was an innovative feature at the time. The system allows objects to be thrown, or to topple if stacked without care. Each object also has a different weight. Another effect of this is that Puggsy can carry stacks of objects along a flat surface, but a slope will often cause all items except the bottom one (held by Puggsy) to topple and scatter.

The Puggsy character originally appeared in an Amiga demo named Puggs in Space, which was created and designed by Dionysus—a demogroup formed by Lee Carus, Alan McCarthy and Tim Wright. The management of Psygnosis was impressed by the demo, and asked Dionysus to develop a game based around Puggsy. However, the contract with Psygnosis to produce a game was short-lived; Wright said the company "didn't really 'get' where we were going with the game". The demogroup was pulled out of the game's development, which was then shifted to Traveller's Tales.

Psygnosis asked Traveller's Tales if they could develop a game using the character from the demo. Puggsy was designed and programmed by Jon Burton, while Andy Ingram handled the graphic design and artwork for the game. While the character design for Puggsy was retained from the demo, the developers changed his colour from red to orange to prevent the consoles from colour bleeding. Wright recalled that Dionysus's version was going to be similar to LittleBigPlanet, while Traveller's Tales' version was created as a standard platformer.

MegaTech gave the game 90% and a Hyper Game Award, saying that it was "excellently designed and thought-out", but listed the control system as the major weak point. Reviewing the Mega-CD version, GamePro praised the controls, the graphics, the sound effects, the strong challenge, and the attention to detail, concluding that "Though veteran gamers will quickly tire of Puggsy, younger players will enjoy his island antics."