Developer: MiniBoss

Time to Beat: 2 hrs

It’s a puzzle platformer with teleportation and shooting aliens how could it not be fun? After getting shot out of the sky and landing on an unknown planet one loan astronaut and his trust teleportation gun must make his way across the planet collecting ship upgrades and health canisters to repair his ship and beat the big bad boss.

I’ve been playing this game off and on for months. It came in a bundle with Polarity and a few other indie games. Every once and a while I remember I have it and complete a level or two, get stuck and stop playing. My backlog challenge has actually forced me to finally beat it.

The mechanics are quite simple. You can jump, you have a teleportation gun that will teleport you to a location where the beam hits a wall, and while teleporting you carry your momentum with you. This leads to a lot of puzzles being solved by jumping, firing the beam, landing on the ground and then jumping as soon as the beam hits the wall to jump higher. Along the way there are (insert name of item here cause I can’t remember it) that you can collect that will make your ship stronger, I think, I didn’t go out of my way to collect them which is why  the boss fight at the end was so difficult.

Let’s talk about the last boss real quick. So most of the game is a puzzle platformer except for the very  beginning and the very game. At these two points in time, the game is a side scrolling space shooter a la R-Type.

I was not prepared for this, the game didn’t prepare me for it, it just threw me in there and said “hey, if you want to actually beat this game play a completely different game.” It’s not that it was hard, it was unexpected and took more than a few tries to get through. I’ve never been that great at dodging bullets and missiles in games like that. What I enjoyed a lot more was the mini boss fight which actually had you use the skills you’d developed through the game and put them to the test. That fight was a lot more fun and a lot less frustrating.

I actually want to go back after the backlog challenge is over, and try to find all the ship upgrades. I would like to know how much easier it makes the final fight plus it’ll add some extra puzzles. I’m not going to lie, I actually had to look up the solutions to two puzzles. As a rule I don’t like doing this but I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out where exactly to jump. In my search for the solution, I saw that the entire game can be beaten in 17 minutes which gives me hope my next play through can be under 2 hours.