E3 might've been a major timesink this week, but nothing stops Indie Game of the Week consarnit. Today's game is Scrap Garden from Flazm (best known for their Train Valley series), released in 2016, which follows a little robot that could on his journey to restore his mechanical civilization after something went awry as he was undergoing maintenance. As one of the last robots to be powered by an internal battery and solar panels, rather than the radioactive energy of a giant red crystal in the heart of his city, he alone survived the sudden destruction of this crystal at the hands of - of all things - a black dragon. The game has him moving from area to area, collecting red crystals, surpassing various 3D platforming challenges, and completing a set of rudimentary laser refraction puzzles to restore a bunch of power stations in the remote provinces surrounding the city, each embodying a different climate: arid wastelands, lush forests, arctic tundra, and uninviting marshlands.

At the game's core it's going for something approaching a PS2-era 3D platformer in the vein of Spyro or Crash Bandicoot, with most of the game situated in these large open maps with the occasional detours into more linear tunnels and structures. Thematically, it more closely resembles Machinarium or previous IGotW game Poncho, taking in the quiet beauty of a post-apocalyptic civilization that's since been abandoned to the elements without anyone left to tend these spaces. The game's graphics make ample use of distance blurring and other filters to add to the otherworld effect, and if it didn't have a net effect of causing some lag and slowdown in areas, I'd commend the choice. Likewise, the protagonist's wastebin design is kinda cute - it reminds me of the unassuming spherical robots of Nier Automata, though that game came later - though most of the enemies have a generic design and look, ranging from rats and spiders for the most part. The music, too, leans into the solitudinous nature of the game's environments with its subdued serenity, though it will offer the occasional tense sting for moments of peril.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is the thing, and for as much heart as Scrap Garden musters the platforming is comprised in a number of problem areas. For one, the game seems to refuse to allow you to jump whenever you're too close to a wall or object, and will likewise seemingly ignore every other double jump command. This, combined with the fact that everything resets to the last checkpoint upon death - including collectibles, which are almost always needed to activate some device to proceed to the next area - are a recipe for frustration. It is frightfully easy to fall off a cliff or into lethal water while crossing a set of jumps when the game doesn't acknowledge half your button clicks, and then you've lost anything up to about five minutes of progress, especially in the larger open areas where the goal is to collect 40-60 crystals from the environment. Monsters need to be jumped on, but it's also easy to get clipped on the way up or down if you're not directly over them, and the hero Canny can only take four hits before expiring. The game's few forays with different gameplay mechanics, like an always unwelcome minecart sequence or a QTE boss fight, seem to suffer from the game's pervasive input lag issue too. For as much as I liked the game's aesthetic and genteel nature, it was frequently a nightmare to actually play.

All that said, it's hard to properly put into context how widespread these issues could be for everyone. The ever-present malus of PC gaming is that a game cannot possibly be optimized for every set-up you might have, and my laptop often runs into trouble with games with a significant polygon count or flashy effects, so it could be that you won't encounter these lag issues at all. I'd still say just in the abstract that Scrap Garden's gameplay is a little rudimentary and derivative - Indie platformers, especially 3D ones, can only rock the boat so much - but entirely serviceable. Even as a self-avowed collectible fanatic, I appreciated this game's approach to giving you a reasonable percentage of items to find rather than trying to procure every hard-to-reach tchotchke, offering the possibility of finding more gems in smaller interstitial areas that lack a goal requirement, which effectively gave you a headstart for next time. Clever touches like these are few and far between, however; Scrap Garden does not go out of its way to innovate, and given the shaky controls I'm sort of glad they reined it in. Better than the alternative of the design writing checks that the execution couldn't cash. A very slim recommendation for this one.

Rating: 3 out of 5.