Maurog
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1501
Registered: 09-16-2004
IP: Logged

You want this: http://store.steampowered.com/app/316080/
Go buy it now.

Recap: The game has 5 levels, every level unlocks a new character, and consists of a tutorial set for the new character's abilities, 6 easy rooms and 6 hard rooms.

The goal in each room is getting the eponymous Parcel as well as all the involved characters to their exit points. This is way harder than it looks, even though all the enemies in the game are pretty much just lasers. You can't move into lasers or make any move that exposes any of your guys to lasers, so you can't ever die, but you can get stuck, oho you can get stuck so much.

Now, lasers can be wall-mounted, going from a wall to one of the four directions, or they can be laser beetles that move back and forth along a horizontal or vertical line, all the while continuously covering that line with lasers.

Your guys can't block the lasers but a Parcel can.

* The carrier dude can pick up a Parcel from adjacent cell, or put a Parcel into an adjacent cell, or push or pull a Parcel along the appropriate direction without picking it up (this is important because it's probably blocking lasers so you can't pick it up).

* The magnet chick can do only one thing - pull a Parcel orthogonally aligned with her all the way it can go. You don't need to have a clear line of sight for this (important because lasers). Pulling a Parcel like that can kill a laser beetle but only if it's pulled at least three spaces, and is aligned with the beetle's direction - you can't kill a perpendicular beetle.

* The hacker guy can use hack cells to toggle special blocks, think of it like an orb, and all the doors are set to toggle, and he must stand on it and use the special ability.

Anyway, you got the idea. It's not actually timed and you can't die, and it's a fun game and you should get it. So go get it.

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Slay the living! Raise the dead!
Paint the sky in crimson red!

RoboBob3000
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1978
Registered: 10-23-2003
IP: Logged

I'm digging this game so far - it was only $1.25 on the day Maurog posted about it, so I'm definitely getting my money's worth. Thanks for the recommendation!

The game is actually a lot larger in scope than Maurog made it sound out to be. The six-easy/six-hard pattern is abandoned by the 4th and 5th worlds, which have 20 and 15 "easy" levels respectively. There are also a bunch of storytelling collectables to pick up (in hard-to-reach areas of certain rooms), and several rooms also track alternate solutions (such as pacifist runs, or kill-everything runs). There's also what appears to be another set of levels called "Reactor" that I haven't unlocked yet. I put in about five hours on this game over the weekend and my completion percentage is surprisingly only in the mid-thirties.

The puzzles in this game are satisfying to me so far - nothing too insurmountable yet. A little bit of foresight and experimentation has been enough to get me through everything I've played so far. The fourth character introduced in the game has the limited ability to swap places with other characters/parcels, which adds a nice layer of complexity.

Some problems, though:

-I love the choice to prevent moves that would result in death. It's a shame that they abandoned that philosophy in the fourth world by introducing an enemy type that can push you into lasers. I've never played a game before where the possibility of death was introduced so late into it.

-Visually, this game is a mess. I wouldn't know how to do it better, but right now I have a hard time parsing out what's what on the screen without really scrutinizing it.

-I'm also hitting some hugely annoying bugs with regular frequency. If I spend too long on any level, perhaps with a bunch of character switches or level restarts, the game will stop accepting about 95% of my keyboard input. I need to quit and re-launch to fix it, losing my current level's progress as a result.

-Also, the game has a useful quicksave feature. However, if you quicksave in a situation where a character is standing behind a parcel that is blocking a laser, the game elements could load out of order (or so it seems). If the character and the laser load first, and the parsel loads last, the character will be killed by the laser, forcing you to restart. This doesn't reproduce 100% of the time, but it has happened to me enough to make me want to never quicksave again.

Overall, though, the manic completionist in me is having fun with this game. I think.

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