The gameplay and the plot are both pretty simple: you’re a bold space warrior exploring the universe, when all of a sudden your ship has a catastrophic problem and everyone needs to evacuate! You and your crewmates make it to the escape pods and land on an unknown, alien planet. It’s full of lushly-illustrated vegetation and yes, scary aliens. You’ll have to shoot your way through to find your crewmates, send up a distress beacon, and hopefully escape!
It’s a 2D platformer shoot-em up; Gameplay consists of mouseclicking like mad on anything that moves, exploring the world, and solving the occasional puzzle. Like I said, pretty straightforward. What gives this game legs is the superb visual and sound design. Seriously, it’s awesome. The alien world around you is rich with detail and rendered in a distinctive hand-drawn style. It’s reminiscent of Machinarium, if you’ve played that. I have no idea how long it takes to create a world that looks like this, but man, it looks downright mesmerizing. I want more games that have this hand-drawn thing going.
For an indie game made in large part by two dudes, it’s surprisingly long, and they do a good job of building up the anticipation at each turn. As simple as it is, they somehow manage to insert you into the drama fairly well; for instance I felt pretty excited to find a crashed escape pod from one of my buddies… and then pretty spooked and angry to find his dead body not far away–murdered by the smarter tribal aliens. I was like “nooo! I will avenge you my fallen brethren!” Maybe it’s the hand-drawn style, or the scarceness of fellow humans, but I felt unusually attached to my nameless space marine friends when I did find them.
Anyway, if you’re lookin for a solid few nights worth of shoot-em-up entertainment, $10! Can’t go wrong for that price. I wholly endorse it.
Tags: Games I Like, general nerdery, video games
