Go! Go! GOTY! '15 ~Day Eleven~ Blackhole
By Mento 1 Comments
Day Eleven
- Game: Blackhole (FiolaSoft Studio).
- Release Month: February.
- Source: The Steam Explorer Sale.
- Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex)
- Started: 08/12.
Man. This one was kind of a bummer. Blackhole is, at its singularity core, a puzzle-platformer with physics manipulation, an interesting world-switching gimmick, and a sense of humor that thinks it's funnier than it actually is. Grist for the mill as far as the Indie market goes. Honestly though? All of that still appeals to me (well, except the last one). Just because Indie puzzle-platformers are a dime a dozen, that doesn't mean that you can't occasionally find a gem if you dig deep enough. Blackhole, alas, is not a gem.
Blackhole tells the tale of the starship Endera and its stalwart crew of lovable cynical jerks as they set out to close black holes (not how those work) before any can threaten the existence of Earth and the human race. On their last adventure, however, something goes wrong and the ship is pulled into the singularity. Only the coffee guy, the protagonist, emerges intact near the ship wreckage and is forced to work with the ship's sophisticated AI Auriel - downloaded to a PDA due to her insubordination, and lacking most of the pertinent facts surrounding the crash - as they look for the nanobot-rich "selfburnium" (what?) to fix the ship and the missing crewmembers in a mysterious black hole-dwelling pocket universe.
Most of the selfburnium requires that the player character manipulate gravity in a series of enclosed levels by finding glowing white floor panels that automatically spins the room's orientation so that the panels are on the bottom - or become the new "down", in other words. The player can collect one or more of the selfburnium orbs within the level and return to the entrance portal to successfully complete the stage, though it would behoove them to find all of these energy orbs before leaving. You cannot simply leave some behind and collect them later, at less risk: all selfburnium must be collected in the same run in the first of the game's inexplicable decisions to make itself more frustrating to play.
What's perhaps worse still, more so than the deliberately irritating AI companion and the above rule seemingly implemented purely to make the game harder rather than enhance the player's experience, are the controls. Blackhole is far too floaty and demands far too much precision and that, my theoretical physicist friends, is a lethal combination. Lethal to anyone's capacity to appreciate this game, its neat gravity-switching scenarios and its catchy soundtrack which immediately recalls the atmosphere of Ratchet & Clank's theremin-heavy 50s sci-fi ambiance. It's a shame too, because it's almost impossible to get a good sense for any game's controls until you have it in front of you with the gamepad in your hands: even if most video game critiquing has moved from the written word to videos with running commentary, it's still a hard aspect to properly convey to your audience and yet unfortunately also one of the most necessary. If it's not wrestling with the game's awful air control to fit your barista spaceman within a tiny gap between two lethal walls, it's trying to figure out the exact timing on the game's indescribably awful water dunk leaps, or having to go by the game's dizzying sense of physics manipulation on feel alone. It's extremely imprecise, and when the game demands that you grab all its shiny gewgaws in one run without dying once, even though each orb has its own difficult gauntlet of timed jumps and mid-leap gravity switches to pass through, completing the game becomes an impossible prospect.
I didn't try the easy mode, I should point out: I believe it removes the "get all the orbs in one run" rule, allowing you to grab one or more, die, and have them stay collected, but even so you'll still feel like a dingus for needing to drop the difficulty to make the game bearable. I'll try playing the game on that mode for a while to see if I change my mind about it, but I'm of the view that the game has an irreconcilable flaw in those awkward controls. Even if everything else is perfect, bad controls are platformer cancer.