• Game: Nifflas Games's Uurnog Uurnlimited.
• Release Month: November (though it first became available as an exclusive "Humble Original" for their February Monthly bundle).
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 11/12.
• Completed: 12/12.

A last-minute addition to Go! Go! GOTY!, Uurnog Uurnlimited was a game I'd never heard of until earlier this week, when I saw it was the latest game from Nifflas: the Swedish developer known for his off-beat and ambient Indie 2D platformers. Most of his games tend to be the spacewhipper variety, with the likes of Saira, Knytt Underground and NightSky, all of which I've covered in the past. Another of his, Affordable Space Adventures, which he co-developed with KnapCok Games, is on my short-list of Wii U games to play before I pack it up to make room for the Switch. So it's safe to say I'm a proponent of his work, if not quite to the extent that I've been closely following everything he's done if this game managed to sneak up on me.

Uurnog Uurnlimited is also an open-world 2D platformer, but has a very different feel to it. After selecting a wide-eyed urchin avatar, you begin in a short tutorial zone that teaches you the basics of the game - the world is filled with cuboid animals and blocks, and you can lift, carry, store, throw and activate them, with the latter option having any number of effects dependent on the type of block you're holding - before dumping you into the "save room". However, this doesn't necessarily mean that this is the room where you save the game, but is instead the only room in a game where its inventory is permanent. Whenever you die, and you'll die a lot either from bumping into hazards or from resetting a puzzle you messed up, the world returns to its default state, with the exception of the save room. The idea being, you can carry objects back into this room and store them somewhere out of the way until you need them.

The primary goal of the game is to find fifteen creatures and "log" them into a computer, similar to something like Grow Home's zoological side-quest, but it's not the only goal and certainly not all there is to see and do. Most of the doors in the save room are initially locked, and a large portion of the game is spent figuring out how to get the keys to open them, and then to solve their many puzzles for rewards ranging from the creatures you need, money for supplies (there's a lot of puzzle short-cuts if you're willing to pay for them), and secrets to uncover.

It's a very chaotic game, in part because of the way the physics causes blocks to fall in random patterns, or "alive" blocks to run around causing mayhem, to the amount of explosives and other chain-reaction causing blocks that might fall into the save room from the many cauldron-like teleporters you can deposit items into for safe-keeping. There's a number of interesting boss fights that rely more on using the game's physics against them than more traditional jumping and shooting mechanics (though they're also options). This chaos can often be a frustration, as often is the case with puzzle games with realistic physics where you'd prefer to have everything working as intended, but that also leaves some wriggle room for solutions that the developer might not have thought of. One such case involves a room where you need to bring in four items with you, your maximum carrying capacity, the presumed intent being that you couldn't bring in any other objects that you might use to side-step the carefully designed puzzles contained within. Instead, I bought an object that can carry multiple objects, and used that to free up some inventory space for a few other objects that I could "cheat" the puzzles with. There were definitely times when I felt annoyed by what the game had just dropped on my lap, such as when a live bomb somehow made its way onto the teleporter and caused a chain-reaction with a lot of stored bombs and other valuable blocks in the save room, or how an instant-death enemy covered with spikes fell into the teleporter without me noticing and manifested over my head once I'd unknowingly jumped in after it. Kinda funny too, though, I admit.

Uurnog's definitely one of those puzzle games like Fez where you're better off diving in with no prior knowledge and trying to figure it out yourself, because a lot of its best moments rely on surprises and epiphanies. The moment you realize you can solve a puzzle by using that item, or uncover a whole other region of the game that leads to a different ending, or how there are permanent changes to the world after one of those said endings. It's an endlessly inventive game, and a weirdly cute one, but may also be something that will regularly test your patience as you struggle to execute on a hastily improvised solution or are forced to deal with an arbitrary and unexpected development. Still, since I started it yesterday I've been hooked, and thinking about it whenever I wasn't playing. That's always a good sign.

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