Pudding Monsters: Cut The Rope Developer Zeptolab Announces Its Next Game

Zeptolab’s Cut the Rope is, without doubt, one of the most successful casual games of the last few years. Today, after 250 million downloads of the original game, the company just announced the launch of its newest game at LeWeb in Paris. The game, called Pudding Monsters, is scheduled to launch in about two weeks, and the team remains relatively tight-lipped about the actual gameplay, but I had a chance to give it a try last night.

Pudding Monsters is all about getting pieces of pudding to stick together. Unlike the physics-based puzzler Cut the Rope that made players focus on getting their timing just right, Pudding Monsters is an even more casual game and doesn’t focus on physics. Instead, it’s a more basic puzzle game where players have to move pieces of pudding around a board, but unless they hit an object or another piece of pudding, the pieces will fall off the board and the game is over. There are numerous game elements, such as pudding pieces that are asleep and wake up when you touch them, that will surely keep gamers occupied and interested in the game for a while.

This is the first time Zeptolab has launched a new franchise since Cut the Rope. Just like Rovio, Zeptolab also licensed plush toys, comic books and other merchandise based on Om Nom, the game’s main character. There is even a live-action TV gameshow in the works. Zeptolab’s CEO Misha Lyalin wasn’t quite willing to share numbers when I talked to him earlier this week, but he did note that merchandising is a major source of revenue for the company and he expects this to continue with the new Pudding Monsters franchise (a tie-in with a food company would be a pretty obvious choice, for example).

Zeptolab currently has 50 employees and is seeing very strong growth in China and other Asian countries.