17/05/12 - Game #15

The game: Rayteoactive's Tobe's Vertical Adventure

The source: The 2012 Indie Royale Spring Bundle

The pre-amble: The Indie 2D platformer is an uncommon thing. Uncommon, at least, without the additional appellation of "puzzle". This game is way more straightforward, as its hearty hydrocephalic heroes employ a couple of vital traversal power-ups and their own natural platforming prowess to navigate a vertically descending level for a big treasure chest before making their way back up a slightly worked-over stage within a newly arrived time limit.

The playthrough: Well. It's not bad looking, adopting the deliberate 16-bit style which has become commonplace in Indie games as well as a sort of anime-lite cartoonish look you'd find in a VG Cats strip. But apparently the developer is from Singapore, so I'm not entirely sure I'd be in the right for calling out the whole overdone anime thing. Or would it? This is seven shades of racist now, so I'll move onto the game's major problem: The controls. It might just be because I'm using a keyboard and that's rarely conducive for precision jumping (though I did well enough with Super Meat Boy), but they're sluggish and unresponsive at the best of times. For instance, I'm fairly sure it's impossible to run and jump at the same time, making some of the longer vaults a bit of a crapshoot. When there's a time limit ticking down and a jump that is far more challenging to make than the graphics would have you believe, either I'm drunk as hell or something's amiss down at the coding level. And I am drever nunk.

That said, it's got a pleasingly straightforward set-up that doesn't involve emotional wrecks reversing time or dumpy-headed albinos waiting until 7am on a Wednesday for a clock to dispense its cuboid treasures and is as short as it needs to be at 16 stages (each will take less than five minutes if you succeed the first time). The 16-bit graphics are sharp, the music's suitably bloopy and like most of these bundle games it is worth as much as you'd care to donate to the creators (which, I believe, is the model Kongregate et al also proffer, though with less fanfare than these dramatic bundle launches). Grab it for a couple of bucks, or don't. There's plenty more like it out there.

The verdict: If I could tolerate those controls, maybe. I should see if it has gamepad support (and then see if I have a gamepad that can support getting supported, as it were).