In truth, I acquired Affordable Space Adventures in a special "Friends of Nintendo" Humble Bundle from a couple years back that I bought largely for a Wii U copy of Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, and promptly forgot about it. It wasn't until I played Uurnog Uurnlimited last December and was doing some research on Nifflas - the Swedish Indie developer who usually fills his 2D games with puzzles, platforming, and sometimes chill, sometimes ominous ambient atmsopheres - that I realized I'd not only missed a game of his, but that I already had a copy of it on a system that has been piling up dust for the past few months. 2018 is going to be a year where I finally put the Wii U to rest, picking up and completing the various games on the system that have yet to seek asylum on the Switch, and I'm starting with this one.

Affordable Space Adventures, like its name suggests, sends the player on an intergalactic adventure in which their safety and happiness has been assured by a chirpy promotional campaign and safety manual guide for a multi-purpose, flying "SmallCraft"planetary exploration vehicle. Crash landing on the planet with most of the vehicle's systems in disrepair, the player hobbles from one location to the next in a vain attempt to send a distress signal back to the corporation that marooned them there, UExplore. Despite the jokey tone of the in-game paraphernalia, seen whenever the game transitions from one area to the next, it's a fairly solitary and quiet journey through a system of puzzles and obstacles that require full control over the ship's systems, or at least control over whichever ones are currently available.

Excaberating an already deadly battle for survival are a plethora of alien "artifacts" scattered all around the planet, most of which will destroy anything within their vicinity. Their proximity sensors are often limited in what they can pick up however, whether it's sound, heat, electrical energy, or a combination thereof. In order to sneak past, the player must disable systems that generate whatever it is the artifacts disagree with. In addition to the various laser puzzles and environmental hazards, you're often having to look the loadout of mechanisms under your command and switch them on and off as needed - this is where the GamePad screen comes in, as it's on here that each function of the ship and its various settings are displayed in a touchpad-friendly manner. Dropping speed to reduce heat and sound, switching landing gears to a frictionless bar and powering off the engine to quietly slide beneath sensors, ramping up the anti-gravity to float through areas in lieu of noisy engine thrust, closing the exhaust to regulate the ship's temperature easier: there's a lot of options to go through, and to the game's credit it metes these out gradually throughout the game, before eventually disabling them at the same pace towards the end as the player's craft limps towards the proverbial finish line.

What's neat about this system is that it often lends itself to improvisation as often as it requires a certain, developer-specific solution. There were a number of scenarios I felt like I passed through in a way that was neither not optimal, but still worked, but were very clearly lucky coincidences. There was one situation where I had to slowly float past a number of mine-like artifacts and then hit a button to shut down a laser barrier and pass through it quickly before it reactivated: the goal was to narrowly avoid the mines, which would zap your craft and cause it to topple aimlessly out of the sky and into the lasers below, yet still be moving fast and accurately enough to hit the button and pass through. Instead, I got zapped almost immediately, tumbled directly onto the button, and still had enough momentum after bouncing off to pass through the barrier. Of course, there were just as many times where I spent upwards to ten minutes trying to get past the same obstacle, so it's not like the game was taking it easy on me. In fact, I'd probably say this was one of the more difficult games that Nifflas has made: there was a fairly high bar for skillful execution and puzzle-solving alike, and I found it especially hard to get my head around the heat/cold puzzles towards the end, as the player's craft has to survive a raging blizzard to make it to the last operational distress beacon before their vehicle freezes.

There's no getting around how the game can be a little on the dull side. Nifflas's whole "ambient atmosphere" vibe can be as soporific as it is tranquil, and Affordable Space Adventures in particular has little in the way of interesting backgrounds and level design. Outside of the more overt puzzle chambers, you end up flying through a lot of tunnels and passageways - some man-made, some decidedly less so - with only some quiet ambient music and the various bleeps and bloops of your craft to keep you company. You may have assumed going into the game, with its facetious "vacation of a lifetime" advertisements and tauted multiplayer features (naturally, with the collapse of the Miiverse, these no longer apply - it's a shame, because it has a great ending that would've been so much better with Miiverse), that it wouldn't feel quite as lonely and contemplative as it does, but I've played enough Nifflas games to know what I was in for. Occasionally frustrating, occasionally ingenious, frequently both simultaneously; this is an underrated game specially suited for - and I've no doubt history will corroborate this some day - an underrated system.

Rating: 4 out of 5.