Playing HumaNature's Doki-Doki Universe, there are vague shadows of a good half dozen or so games, while at the same time nothing else I've played of late really comes close. I feel that's often the mark of a good game. No game is an island, and game design being as iterative as it is means that no brand new intellectual property or genre-launching pioneer is entirely distinct from what has come before. Instead, the best games take ingredients we know and love and create a whole new recipe out of them. Doki-Doki Universe is absolutely the most casual experience I've had with his feature, for better or worse, but it ably exhibits a distinctive approach to its objective-completing that seems intended to hook those who, perhaps, don't play games too often. The goal of the game is simple enough in the abstract but difficult to quantify in discrete video game terms: a robot, stranded alone on a planet for decades, is found by an alien recall engineer so his parts can be recycled to create more advanced robots that had been designed in the interim. However, if he can prove that his antiquated model is still capable of demonstrating the elusive virtue that is "humanity", he can be allowed to continue existing and perhaps even rejoin the human family who unwillingly abandoned him so long ago.

The game generally involves landing on a new planet, talking to its citizens and solving their problems, either maximizing or minimizing their fondness towards you so they give you a present, and finding the rest of the hidden collectibles on the planet by lifting up parts of the scenery. After this, you take off to find a new planet with a new theme and cast of characters to assist in a similar way. Playing the game alongside No Man's Sky has inadvertently cast a harsher shadow on the latter, given that the land-discover-takeoff pattern is the same but Doki-Doki Universe goes out of its way to give you a concrete checklist of goals for each of its destinations. As well as the planetary meet and greets the player is free to indulge their own curiosity about themselves by taking part in little personality quizzes on the smaller asteroids between planets. I'm naturally extremely cautious about any combination of interplanetary travel and personality tests, since the last thing I want to be is a brainwashed sailor in the middle of the Pacific worrying about Thetans flowing out of any underwater volcanoes we happen to be passing over, but the game's true goal is to use the little robot's quest for humanity as an allegory for the player seeking their own sense of self. You're regularly advised to take a trip back to your home planet - which you can also decorate with the many collectibles you've found - to check in with a psychiatrist character and get a more general reading on your personality that aggregates all the asteroid quizzes you've taken so far.

There's a bit more to the gameplay than that, of course. At its beating heart, the game is one of those imagination-based puzzle games by way of Scribblenauts, only not quite as open-ended. Rather than tapping into an immense database of objects and creatures through a text parser, the player collects a finite number of "summonables" through finding hidden presents and rewards from those they've befriended, and by conjuring all these disparate concepts into being - each of which has a number of adjectives attached, like "cute" or "scary" or "refreshing" - the robot can solve everyone's problems and requests for them, engendering their affection and proving himself to be empathetic and compassionate to the skeptical alien overseer keeping tabs on their performance. This aspect can be a little too simple sometimes; even though you have a whole galaxy to explore (though that essentially equates to about 20 planets and almost twice as many asteroids), any items you need to solve a planet's problems can be found on the very same planet. That means there's never a need to leave and come back later to fully complete a world, which is convenient, but it also means that the solutions to everyone's problems are painfully simple given the limited number of options. Considering the game is reaching out to those who might spend a lunch break figuring out which Friends character they most closely resemble rather than, say, a 30-minute 1CC run of DoDonPachi, it errs on the side of being difficulty-free. Again, no shade meant to those it intends to entice if video games aren't generally their deal, nor does a puzzle game necessarily have to constantly stump you like the mentally-gruelling Professor Laytons, Stephen's Sausage Rolls or Snakebirds elsewhere, but just something to keep in mind if you're looking for a challenge.

Doki-Doki Universe is exceedingly adorable, with a papercraft/doodle world and an emphasis placed on being kind, being helpful and communicating in waves, hugs and blown kisses. The robot's best friend is a red balloon, he can ride a flying pig (or a whale, or a sentient poop) around space and even the game's closest thing to an antagonist - your overseer Alien Jeff, who was actually called "Alien" by his parents - is supportive and patient. It's a game created by people who clearly feel that most games are far too mean and violent, and that's a sentiment I'm likely to mock and concur with in equal measure. I'm a guy of multitudes, you might say. I can't fault its doki-doki heart or its delightfully twee universe, but I am fairly sure that this game isn't what I'm looking for in this medium. A certain non-game-playing relative of mine, though? Into it.

Rating: 3 out of 5.