Hard to describe.
At its most material, it's a form-shifting platformer where you can swap forms at any time, allowing you to chain form swaps to do funny movement combos. Some stuff is self-explanatory - Tine attract you to magnets, Car is low to the ground and fast, Bomp is a bouncy ball - and some stuff is so odd that its utility has to be experienced - Polyp allows you to phase through walls by altering your center of mass, Pray disappears blocks which slowly reappear. In addition, there's several common rules that lead to some clever puzzle solution, like geometry backfaces being immaterial but not their fronts. You'll have to return to some levels later when you have the right forms to attempt them.
Married to this is a surrealist psychedelic aesthetic that is definitely unplayable to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy and which is more than a little disorienting. As a friend described it, "game looks like my graphics card is dying."
And... it's also very emotionally affective. To reduce this game to its most mechanical elements is to do it a disservice, although not much of one since the platforming challenges are very clever. Lovely music and surprisingly smart pacing/writing that caught me off guard. Most games I play don't/can't surprise me either mechanically or emotionally, and this game has done both. Maybe I've just experienced so many games in my time playing that straightforward "dad loses daughter" stuff can't touch my heart where this can. I dunno.
Definitely a game for the discerning player who is looking for something very different from the pack. Hits the mark for me. Love it.
At its most material, it's a form-shifting platformer where you can swap forms at any time, allowing you to chain form swaps to do funny movement combos. Some stuff is self-explanatory - Tine attract you to magnets, Car is low to the ground and fast, Bomp is a bouncy ball - and some stuff is so odd that its utility has to be experienced - Polyp allows you to phase through walls by altering your center of mass, Pray disappears blocks which slowly reappear. In addition, there's several common rules that lead to some clever puzzle solution, like geometry backfaces being immaterial but not their fronts. You'll have to return to some levels later when you have the right forms to attempt them.
Married to this is a surrealist psychedelic aesthetic that is definitely unplayable to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy and which is more than a little disorienting. As a friend described it, "game looks like my graphics card is dying."
And... it's also very emotionally affective. To reduce this game to its most mechanical elements is to do it a disservice, although not much of one since the platforming challenges are very clever. Lovely music and surprisingly smart pacing/writing that caught me off guard. Most games I play don't/can't surprise me either mechanically or emotionally, and this game has done both. Maybe I've just experienced so many games in my time playing that straightforward "dad loses daughter" stuff can't touch my heart where this can. I dunno.
Definitely a game for the discerning player who is looking for something very different from the pack. Hits the mark for me. Love it.