‘Slime Shop’
500 pcs., Le Puzz
Earlier this year, I was introduced to the brand Le Puzz by my friend Kayla (@puzzleswithkk on IG), who was participating in a puzzle-along (#LePuzzAlong) spotlighting their puzzles. From the jump, I was delighted by their quirky-cool imagery and the impressive cohesion of their brand, from their website and social media through to their packaging and the puzzles themselves. As a brand, Le Puzz manages to find a perfect juxtaposition between the zany, slightly “off” energy of vintage puzzles and a modern aestheticism that makes these yellow-boxed beauties shelf-worthy in our contemporary world.
At first glance, these puzzles would be equally at home in a vintage shop or on display at Urban Outfitters or a curated contemporary home store. Their puzzle images include an assemblage of colorful fruits, an array of splattered paints and art supplies, kitschy vintage candles, cute stickers, and shelves of fake food objects (a fabulous image called ‘Oops!’ that celebrates food accidents frozen in time). Ocassionally their images skirt the line between being beautiful and outright bonkers, as with the puzzle “Slime Shop,” from their latest Winter 2022 collection, which is the subject of this post.
First, a little back story about this puzzles’s appeal to me. In the past few years, snails — squishy yet hard, reclusive yet exploratory — have quickly become one of my favorite animals. In my previous apartment, the driveway I would walk up and down daily to reach my cozy apartment was frequented by many tiny garden snails, which would slide across the driveway and up walls, some of them tiny babies (like the one pictured on the right above) and others slightly larger, sometimes with intricate, vividly colored shells. As silly as it seems, I started to think of these tiny harmless creatures as being as much my neighbors as the humans in my building (whom I often saw less frequently than the snails).
Did you know that most snails are hermaphroditic, meaning they can mate with any other snail?
As I was walking up the driveway on one particularly harrowing evening, I heard a terrible crunch beneath my feet. Generally, I would keep an eye out as I was traversing the driveway, but because it was darker out I must have missed one. The snail in question was one of the ones I anthropomorphized as one of the “mama snails.” I was gobsmacked by what I’d accidentally done, and in the ensuing hours was stunned to see that many of the smaller “baby” snails gathered around the body of their senior, seemingly to pay their respects and mark its passing.
Certainly, I had superimposed my own human emotions and perceptions on these tiny animals — but didn’t it help me make sense of their world, and the situation? Isn’t that what we so often do with animals in our lives, be they pets in our own homes or stories of animals around the world that we see on TV or on TikTok? Le Puzzle’s fabulous ‘Slime Shop’ image brings to mind the same feeling, imagining these two simple (or are they?) snails in the image, one in line at the grocery store, the other playing the role of cashier, presumably ringing up the tiny food items. Clearly the snail in the checkout lane has no chance at winning ‘Supermarket Sweep’ any time soon, but I would say the cashier-snail seems just as nonplussed.
The artwork of “Slime Shop,” which was originally titled “Al Dente’s Grocery Trip,” is by artists Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland, who have collaborated on a series of miniature scenes featuring frogs and snails that they’ve compiled into a book called Snail World: Life in the Slimelight.
While I wish I could say I took my time with this puzzle, instead I devoured it like the snacks in the background of its image. Le Puzz’s pieces are deliciously chunky, and I love that their backing boards are always vibrant colored (for this one, they are a lovely shade of green).
To me, the experiential nature of a jigsaw puzzle encompasses several elements — the box and packaging of the puzzle and its aesthetic “shelf value,” the puzzling process itself, and what you do with the puzzle after. Regarding that middle aspect, the puzzling itself, ‘Slime Shop’ really epitomizes the playful, exploratory quality that their puzzle cuts encourage. In a nutshell, the delight comes from the inclusion of gemini pieces — those little knobby pieces you see in the images above with two flat sides and two tabs. Their presence adds an added element of surprise within the process, both by making the edges less obvious and occasionally deceptive and by breaking up the gaps and spaces of the puzzle into smaller segments that can catch the puzzler off guard in the best way. It’s like the addition of an extra rush of dopamine — no longer is it just about the solution, it’s about the little solutions on the way, as you discover the spaces in the puzzle where a gemini creeps in to save the day in a place you thought was impossible to fill with any of the remaining pieces.
When it comes to the post-puzzling experience, Le Puzz has uniquely well-considered boxes. Just look at all the fun they’ve managed to pack into the back of ‘Slime Shop,’ including a maze and a cheeky interview with “Al Dente” the snail. Now that I’ve completed the puzzle, this is one that I feel strongly about keeping in my collection, but if you’re someone who l loves to share puzzles with friends and loved ones, I think this is a perfect puzzle to circulate for exponential enjoyment.
If you’re looking for a puzzle that’s well-made, well-appointed, and well-enjoyed, Le Puzz’s slate of recent releases is a perfect choice, and “Slime Shop” in particular epitomizes the ethos of the brand. There’s a lyric in Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” that really sums it up: “Oh, but they’re weird and they’re wonderful.”
To that, I say: indeed.
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