It's the distant future. The cities of man lie in ruins, nature having taken most of its territory back from the concrete monoliths that once defied it. What remains are not people but machines: robots created by humanity in their image but are abandoned and bereft of purpose with their absence, left to eke out existences of their own choosing and ponder their own inchoate stirrings of consciousness that their creators buried deep within their programming. That's NieR: Automata in a nutshell, of course, but PlatinumGames' 2017 GOTY is not the only post-apocalyptic, inorganic-exclusive game in town. Delve Interactive's Poncho depicts an eerie but still lively world that has slowly begun to recover after some nebulously defined calamity that claimed the human species and most of the animals, with a cute little robot wearing the titular garment waking up in a ruined laboratory on a journey to find its purpose.

Poncho invokes two prior Indie games specifically, one more overtly than the other: Mutant Mudds, from which it borrows its distinctive three-tier background/foreground hopping mechanic, and Fez, from which it borrows most of the tone, style, musical direction, and an unhurried exploratory vibe to the gameplay - not to mention that both games are named for a piece of clothing usually worn by those living in arid climates. It's not quite a best of both worlds composite of the two, but there are far worse design concepts to iterate upon. The background switching in particular has some neat applications in this game, as it introduces blocks that will shift alongside you, either moving when you do or automatically on a timer. The platforming can be quite challenging and sneaky, especially when it requires you to fall back a layer and move behind an obstacle in one of the foreground layers: you kind of have to think in three dimensions, in a more literal sense than usual. However, the game's still going for a Fez chill-out environment, so in order to assuage any frustration that may be anathema to that vibe there's no penalty for dying. In fact, you simply respawn instantaneously at the last piece of stable ground you were standing on, losing only seconds of progress. It's not always perfect: you can find yourself respawning into an inaccessible area a few times if there are moving blocks around, which kind of telefrags you a few times until things settle down, though there was one occasion where I wouldn't stop telefragging and had to leave the stage. Only happened once, however, and the game saves all collectible progress regardless.

Speaking of which, the collectibles in this game kind of highlight a rather pressing concern with the game: that it feels unfinished and unpolished. You get a sense of that with the slightly glitchy respawning above, or instances where you narrowly clip the platform when bouncing through layers and get killed rather than hear the usual little angry beep to indicate that your egress is blocked. However, it's when you take in the collectibles - and, to a lesser extent, the game's underutilized capacity for new upgrades - that you realise that the game is far shorter and far less feature-rich than it was perhaps intended. The collectibles, little red diamonds called power cores (and red diamonds were the exact same shape and color of the collectibles in Mutant Mudds, which suggests someone maybe forgot to switch in a less indictable form later in development), are used to buy keys which unlock alternate routes through levels. These alternate routes invariably lead to more power cores, however, so unless some alternate level exits or new power-ups got cut from the game, there's no follow through for this concept. More telling still is that there are far more keys to buy than you have currency to buy them, and certainly far more keys than there are doors to use them on. It's like someone designed the shop interface first based on an earlier, more ambitious design document and were too deep into crunch time before realizing their mistake. Likewise, you collect a spacewhipper style power-up early on - a stomp move, which destroys certain types of ground tile that can lead to collectibles or entire subterranean areas - and then nothing else after that. A side-quest resurrecting robots goes nowhere too: the first three milestone totals gets you a key each time, which are still useless given how many there are and how many are actually needed, and the fourth and final milestone gets you... nothing at all.

Despite this pervasive sense that the game is a shadow of what it was meant to be, and that it's overall pretty short and not too challenging with the instant-respawns, I liked Poncho well enough. It has its heart in the right place, decided to build upon two Indie games with great ideas that no-one else bothered to touch, and while the sprite-scaling can be a little inelegant at times it has a charming pixel art direction with some cute robot designs milling around, like a robotic snail with a little buzzing monitor for a shell. The soundtrack's pretty good too, though the game has some of the worst sound-mixing I've heard: it got deafeningly loud at points, even with the in-game volume turned down. Poncho definitely could've used some more fine-tuning, but it's not a malfunctioning jalopy either. And, hey, I didn't have to complete it five times to see its best ending, so that's something.

Rating: 3 out of 5.