Past meets present: Sutte Hakkun

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

If it was on Satellaview, you’ll just have to find it yourself. That’s been the way for quite some time now, with Nintendo, and any third-parties that published games to their satellite-based Super Famicom add-on in the 90s, simply ignoring that stretch of history with re-releases and Virtual Console and the like in the years since. You’d get the occasional nod from one of those companies — Square Enix released Radical Dreamers, the tie-in to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, as part of their 2022 remaster of the latter — but any preservation of Satellaview offerings has been the realm of actual game preservationists, and not commercial interests. Like Matthew Callis, who I had an entire conversation with on the subject for a Paste Magazine feature on the preservation of the Satellaview game, Kirby’s Toy Box, and all that went into making that happen.

And then, with zero fanfare or promotion beyond “this is here now”, Nintendo dropped one of their original Satellaview games onto Nintendo Switch Online in January of 2025. That’s not a complaint, either, just complete shock. Sutte Hakkun is a puzzle platformer that originally released via Satellaview broadcasts, and then later, as a cartridge for the Super Famicom given its popularity on the service. Nintendo tended to put quite a few sequels or spin-offs to existing franchises on Satellaview — Fire Emblem, Famicom Detective Club, Dr. Mario, even The Legend of Zelda — but Sutte Hakkun went in the opposite direction. Released in late-1997, when the Nintendo 64 had already been in Japan and North America for a year and Europe/Australia since the spring, Sutte Hakkun was likely never in any danger of leaving Japan. Despite the fact that Nintendo continued to release Super Famicom titles until it was nearly the time of the GameCube — the Super Famicom release of Metal Slader Glory came out on November 29, 2000, as the final licensed game for the system just over nine months before the GameCube arrived — their support in North America ended far sooner. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 arrived in North America in November of 1997, just like Sutte Hakkun did, and that was the final Nintendo-published game for that region in that system. (And frankly, if it hadn’t been a mainline Kirby game, they probably wouldn’t even have done that: their previous worldwide first-party title on the SNES was Donkey Kong Country 3, released an entire year prior, where Nintendo in Japan released another 25 first-party titles from 1998 onward.)

Sutte Hakkun’s history actually begins before the Satellaview release. It was initially going to be a Game Boy title with Super Game Boy support and a Game Boy Color variant, to release in 1996, but that never ended up happening. Its existence wasn’t even widely known until the 2020 leaks of Nintendo’s historical data, wherein the various versions of it were discovered. Why it didn’t end up coming out is still unclear, given that the builds discovered of it in those leaks were final, but Nintendo ended up releasing a Sutte Hakkun game on Satellaview, anyway, so it’s not as if the entire concept was abandoned.

But it really should have been released much sooner than it was, because Sutte Hakkun rules. Nintendo co-developed it — studio R&D2, specifically — with indieszero, which you might know from other obscurities like Electroplankton, or their partnership with Square Enix on the Theatrhythm titles, or Sushi Striker, for which they were also co-developers. indieszero is responsible for Retro Game Challenge, and NES Remix, and last year’s Nintendo World Championships release, too. It all started with Sutte Hakkun, and it’s not difficult to imagine that if it had been released on any other platform with far more reach — you know, like the Game Boy or Game Boy Color — that it would have been a much bigger deal, and maybe indieszero would have been, too. Though, considering the kinds of games they’ve stuck to over the last nearly 30 years, maybe that’s just what they wanted to be doing regardless of any success, anyway.

The good news is that Sutte Hakkun is here now, for anyone to play so long as they’ve got the base-level Nintendo Switch Online subscription. It’s also in its Super Famicom cartridge form, which means it’s the complete, larger version with additional stages and tutorials and the like, rather than the smaller editions released over multiple Satellaview broadcasts, which were more limited in storage space than one that was fit to a cartridge. Say what you will about NSO — I certainly have — but the model has really committed to bringing up things that even the sickos in your life have never played before.

Here’s how Sutte Hakkun works. You play a little… bird? By the name of Hakkun. The question there is because the bird is both transparent and empty, unless you happen to fill it. You do this with the bird’s beak, which can suck up other transparent objects, like blocks, or paints to fill them with that also imbue them with new characteristics, or living rock creatures, or Makkun, which are also transparent but look like they’d be pretty cute and cuddly if not for being able to see through them in an unsettling way. There are traps — spikes that kill you, glass floors you can break through but are used to impede progress until then, the aforementioned rock dudes named Rockkun, the Blokun that are not blocks you can move around but are instead living blocks that are tickled by you poking at them with your beak and scurry away from that, Tsubokun that are like Blokun but for paint bottles, and one-way barriers that you can fall right through without some supports built underneath in advance.

The goal of every stage is to reach the rainbow shard or shards, and to do so while you’ve still got points to score. There’s no timer in Sutte Hakkun, but instead, you start with X number of possible points — 1,000 for the easier early levels, thousands more for tougher, later ones — and the point total goes down every time you do anything. Take a step? Lose points. Jump? Lose points? Grab a block with your beak? Get some paint? Fill the block with paint? Jump on the now-moving block? Points, points, points, and more points. The idea is to finish as efficiently — but not as quickly — as possible, and then later on see if you can improve on your score. The points don’t matter for anything other than bragging rights really, to the point I watched a couple of walkthrough levels by someone who just continually jumped the entire time for the fun of it, losing points the entire way, but they’re there for you to set new bests and to see how inefficiently you did things until you figured out how to do a better job of it. If you use an in-game hint to help you complete the level, it cuts your potential points in half, too, so be aware of that if you’re planning to care about said points.

Luckily, there’s an in-game tutorial where you can view various techniques that’ll help you out, and much of what you might be able to do is intuitive, at least in terms of possibilities. The levels aren’t really designed with any “extra” parts in mind unless they’re there to somehow make your life harder, so if you can figure out what’s useful and what’s just pretending to be a real block or a real bottle of paint before you even start moving around — press the R shoulder button to be able to look around the level at your leisure without walking or using up points — then you’ll be in a better place.

Consider the above embedded video. All of the paint bottles are crossed out, which means you don’t have any access to new paint. There are already four blocks there — all red — full of paint, and no other blocks or objects to manipulate. So you look at that and have to think, “I have four blocks, and four red paints, but I’ll lose a paint every time I remove one since the only place to put it is back into the block it came out of.” Which then allows you to realize that hey, you need the elevator to be higher, but since the blocks are all moving in sync, how can you access any of the blocks to be able to make one of them eventually go higher? The answer, as it often is, lies in the environment. You have to read the room, literally, in every stage, especially later on. Which I don’t have any gameplay videos of my own to show you, since the stages tend to take much longer than the 30 seconds of capturing that the Switch’s native service allows, but trust me when I say they’re far, far more involved than the previous video, or the below one.

The first half of the game, as with something like the Game Boy’s Catrap, exists to prepare you for the latter half of the game, which expects you to have internalized every concept you’ve learned to that point, to deploy them in even more Spartan and complicated scenarios. I blew through the first 50 stages in short order, and it took a whole lot longer to figure out the rest. They aren’t impossible, by any means, but let’s just say that you get infinite retries and a hint system and 50 levels to prepare you for when they start being a lot less obvious with how they’re to be solved for a reason.

Sutte Hakkun is entirely in Japanese, but that only matters when it comes to the game’s menus. The third option down in-level is for restarting the stage: that’s the one you’ll end up picking the most often. The game itself is all about visual context clues and thinking things through, with language not a concern at all. Again, it’s amazing that the Game Boy and Game Boy Color releases of this game never materialized, considering how little localization work needed to be done, but it also makes a ton of sense that the portable realm is where the ideas first came to be, since Sutte Hakkun feels a lot like a first-party DSiWare game that a dozen people bought, and all of them loved it, and also Nintendo never bothered promoting it. Sure that’s a real if you know you know situation considering, but, hey. If you know.

Blocks are going to be what you spend the most time figuring out. Some levels have blocks you need to manipulate into the correct place without any modifying paints, instead relying on your ability to properly place them where you can get to them later — which is sometimes stuck halfway or all the way into a wall, do not consider the physics of any of this besides in how they can help you finish a level — and others require you to use one or two or even all three kinds of paints, sometimes in the same just two blocks or so depending on where you are. There are switches to change the paint color — there can only be one color for bottles at a time, so if you need both yellow paint and red paint at the same time, you’ve got to be sure to store away one of those in a block while you make the switch to another — and you have to manipulate those switches with yourself, or a Rockun, or a Makkun, and sometimes the Makkun is also a painted color.

The red blocks serve as elevators, whose lowest position will be wherever you put the paint into it. So, if you want a red elevator to go higher, you need to make yourself go higher, then pull out the paint and pop it back in when it’s up beyond its initial starting place. The blue paint makes blocks move side to side, and the same principle applies, though, they also go in the direction you’re facing when you fill them with paint. Yellow paint makes blocks move upward diagonally, and you’re going to use these to often go entirely through walls and floors to be used later on when you need them again. Yellow blocks are both a blessing and a curse, and the ones most liable to make your brain cramp.

The Makkun can also be filled with paint, and then react differently depending on which color. Make ‘em red, and they become like a spring for you: they squish down with your weight bearing down on them, and then you can launch yourself much higher than if you were jumping entirely under your own power. Blue acts a lot like the block does, but walking back and forth instead of floating, and, unlike the block, is not beholden to a limited range: a blue Makkun will walk until an obstacle forces it to turn and walk back the other way. And yellow Makkun, rather than moving diagonally, jump in place on a loop. So, if you need multiple paint colors, for instance, at different points in the same stage, and you can drop a yellow Makkun on top of a switch to just rotate through the colors in perpetuity, then that would solve your problem.

Some levels are slow-moving, with you just going from block to block that you set up, and others will test your timing and your reflexes. Wait until you realize there are stages where you need blocks to be moving simultaneously but not in sync, so that you can jump from one block to the other in a way that lets you grab the paint in it and then reset it to move from a different starting position. Or the ones where you must grab multiple blocks as you fall down a short shaft, taking them from the right and placing them on the left to be grabbed later, and doing so at the exact correct spacing or else you won’t be able to reach them as you climb. It’s a game where placing a block at the exact correct spot is going to be necessary — like, exactly exact — if you plan on moving forward instead of having to start over.

However! Between the infinite restarts and the fact that NSO has built-in rewind features, you probably won’t be bothered by this too much if you’re patient, especially since efficiency is the name of the game here. You have to replay a stage you got through most of? Good news, even the long ones are short, and you’ll do better the second time, anyway.

You unlock three stages at a time, and can play them in whatever order you feel like. Each stage has 10 levels, and once you complete a certain number of them, you cross a threshold and unlock three more stages. You don’t have to complete every level from stages 1-3 to unlock 4-6, or play all of stage 4 before opening up stage 5, and so on. Since your knowledge is meant to be accumulated and stacked, though, and concepts introduced in one stage can be used in a later one that’s going to be less interested in teaching you, it’s best not to stray too far from the linear path other than if you get stuck on one level in particular. You can always come back to it, or any completed stage, at another time, however.

It’s a very cute game — the Rockkun having a smug little smirk that turns into a frown when you stand on its head kills me every time — and it animates in the ways you’d expect Nintendo’s late-SFC-era games to animate. The music is also a standout: you’re “stuck” with the same theme for a while, but after you’ve completed enough levels, you’re treated to a stage with new music, and then that music will get stuck in your head for a long while, but in a pleasant way. It’s nothing you’re going to be mad about hearing for a long time, which is good, because, especially late-game, you’re going to be hearing a lot of the same music given how much more complicated everything is.

The actual Satellaview broadcasts of Sutte Hakkun aren’t out there in an official capacity, no, but the Super Famicom rarity that came out of one of the services most successful games — and few truly original experiences — finally is. You’re missing out on this one if you’re worried about playing something you’ve never heard of before, because it’s just a killer puzzle platformer. A game so good that I’m retroactively mad about Nintendo not releasing it earlier, or converting the Game Boy Color variant for the DSi or whatever, but in the end, I still got to play Sutte Hakkun. And after you do the same, you’ll know that’s the most important thing here.

Also though, get going on a sequel.

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