If there's a few great recurring elements across many Indie games, it's doing a lot with a little in graphical terms. No shade meant to Messhof, the developer pair behind Flywrench (and also the similarly stylish Nidhogg!); if anything, the game's abstract look ends up being just as visually arresting as anything more aesthetically elaborate. As the inimitable Austin Walker might say, the game's got a look. From what I've been able to gather from the story, the player is moving through the solar system re-establishing satellite signals by completing some hacker-ish computing, visually represented in-game as a little rectangle flying through a lot of colored barriers. You start at Pluto and make your way inwards, stopping at every planet for a bit of amusing new-age psychobabble from your mysterious companion/boss/partner and a whole new set of courses to complete.

The player can change into three colors based on pressing two buttons: red, which provides a small thrust upwards, successive taps of which generate the primary means of propulsion; green, which causes the shape to spin wildly but offers some invulnerability; and white, the shape's neutral state. By quickly changing one's color to match the barriers, Ikaruga-style, the player will pass harmlessly through. It's all very intuitive, and the game moves at a clip with the type of rewarding cyclical flow clearly inspired by a game like Super Meat Boy - which, once upon a time, featured an early example of Flywrench's quadrilateral hacker (not that one) as a hidden character. You jump into a level, die a few times until you figure out the trick or the precise timing to fling yourself towards the exit, and continue to the next without a moment's pause and without the trippy background EDM skipping a beat. As you pass by each planet in the solar system, new obstacle types are introduced from new different colored lasers to moving hazards, but it doesn't take long for the player to take them in stride. For the first eight planets, the music and the gameplay flow combine together to create this wonderful instinctual stream of obstacle, experimentation, resolution.

And then you get to the planet Mercury.

I won't denigrate Flywrench's developer too much - this design flaw is hardly unique to this game, and it's always super difficult to get a flow like this right due to the wildly varying skill levels of the players, myself sitting somewhere in the middle - but whenever I play a masocore game like Super Meat Boy or Flywrench or countless others, the harsh difficulty is mitigated by the short size of the levels and how they can bolster positive reinforcement by ensuring each roadblock is only transitory until the player can intuit the right timing. However, you will eventually hit a wall that completely interrupts that flow and betrays what made the rest of the game so appealing. In almost every case, it's when the levels become too large and the previously irrelevant lack of checkpoints instead becomes a major detriment. A perfectly designed Flywrench level should require the player to surpass four or five challenging obstacles at most: I pulled that number out of nowhere, but I'd estimate it as the rough average for most of Flywrench's bite-size courses. Because the game requires a lot of precision, often under the duress of a timed switch or a quickly-moving lethal barrier bearing down on you, a player is only likely to have the concentration to perfectly nail a small number of obstacles before reaching the exit and having a new batch of precision challenges to overcome.

I ought to point out that it's distressingly easy, due to how precise the player needs to be with the game's floaty momentum-based physics and shape-switching timing involved, to crash and burn in even the most innocuous situations. If you need to build a little speed by tapping the red "flap" button, you might end up pressing the button twice in too quick a succession, launching you directly into the ceiling. Usually whenever this happens, it's never a big deal: you automatically respawn back at the beginning of the course with only seconds of progress lost, and you can spend the next few moments getting the timing perfect until you're right back in the flow again and moving along to the next challenge.

Yet, when I reached Mercury's eighteenth level and even before then, the number of these consecutive precision challenges in a single stage rose from four or five to something closer to eleven or twelve. It might not sound like much, but getting the timing down to move past all of those barriers in quick succession begins to come down to luck or muscle memory, rather than skill. When you reach this point, you're either a godlike player who has been sleepwalking through the game so far, or you've been moving at a reassuringly steady pace and have suddenly hit this wall at full speed. I spent more time on this single course than I did for the previous eight planets combined. I eventually decided that nothing was worth the aggravation and wasted time, and turned the game off. I got shit to do, y'all.

Eventually, one day, a masocore action game that relies this much on creating a pleasurable flow of small obstacle courses completed in moderately quick succession won't fall at the last hurdle by arbitrarily spiking the difficulty level by several magnitudes by gluing together what would normally be two or three courses into one gigantic metaphorical fallen tree trunk in the middle of the road. The type of metaphorical flora that causes you to brake violently and dedicate the next hour of your once-pleasant journey to find a way around it. Until that time, when that acme of a masocore game finally transpires, I'm done with any game that fits the description.

Rating: 5 out of 5 (Just Pluto to Venus). 2 out of 5 (+ Mercury). (Yes, I am being a baby about this.) (Yes, I will probably suck it up and return to Mercury-18 because goshdangit was I so close to the end.) (This game is great, though, for reals. Worth checking out. But, you know, maybe quit before Mercury.)