Alright jumping into another game that looks pretty simple – Standby! Unlike polyball, this one is much closer to what I expected based on the steam snapshot. You’re a simple stick figure character navigating basic timing based maps. It looks a bit like N+ but feels a lot more spastic.

Pretty straight forward here – you are basically only using 6 buttons, the 4 arrow keys to direct movement, Z to slide, and spacebar to jump. As you can probably guess your character can hug walls and wall jump pretty freely.

The first 5-10 levels teach you all the basic combination moves you can make. Forward+Z sends you into a dash slide that allows you to safely cross red bars of death for a bit. Z when you’re in the open air puts you into a dive bump that will send you into a slide if you hit ramped ground. If you hit a blue patch space bar will send you into a super jump. Z while not moving fires a little laser beam capable of taking out small walls.

All of these are taught within the context of reasonably challenging levels which I would call a proper tutorial – no throwaway maps, you must learn each skill to progress.

Although the initial look and feel is a bit like N+, the maps are much more linear – there’s generally only one way to get through each map and it comes down to timing the right series of directed movements and taps as you navigate each fault.

The game is hard, but I would say it’s right in the sweet spot difficulty wise. You will die and reset a lot each level, but as you get better at each section you will get back to the fault you’re working on faster and faster, gaining rhythm – and the levels are never so long that you get frustrated by too many difficult faults in a row.

But why tell you about it when I can show you? Enjoy a little sample of the kind of sweet sweet frustration you could be in for:

That’s pretty much what this feels like. I would not put it on the level of N+, because you never feel fully in control of your character. N+ had the agility and momentum based movement that let you really feel like a parkour ninja when you executed a series of wall jumps perfectly.

This game gives you a touch of that great “NAILED IT!” feeling when you complete a difficult level. Like N+ it knows you’re going to die a lot so the reset button is instant and painless. It’s so fast, in fact, the map itself doesn’t seem to fully reset (for example a timed laser will continue on from whichever beat you died on, rather than hard resetting – weird).

The levels are well designed, in the sense that everything works within the set movements your character can do, and once you know the timing it’s all achievable.

There’s no room for exploration though and your character’s baseline movement is fairly annoying. Tiny left and right movements leave your character hopping and sliding all over the place. There’s no time to gather your wits, this game does not want you to stop and consider. It’s crash wildly through each level, nailing ever turn and drop, or bust.

One thing I do love about these games is they teach you the fact that muscle memory is faster than your brain. Most of the time when you die it’s because you hit Z instead of space or up+space instead of down+space. You have to let your hands learn the rhythm and sequence, and any attempt to try to give your brain the wheels to think through that sequence and repeat it will kill you instantly.

I think I will complete this game as I’m generally enjoying the difficulty level and feel of it. For now I give it a B+ . . . it’s well executed and I enjoy the difficulty level and the feel of it. I do feel they went out of their way to make the characters regular movement spastic and clunky as a means of making the game more difficult and I don’t think that was a good choice – it shows some insecurity about making a hard game, but it just adds some arbitrary spaz deaths to sequences that are already plenty hard on their own.

Will edit when I complete if I have anything to add. But I’d recommend this as a solid effort as a platformer. This reminds me that I still need to play super meat boy, which is in this vein but looks like a much fuller experience animation wise.

Edit: here’s one more clip of a late-stage level. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of the last two or three before I finished. As you can see, eventually you get to a point where you’re not so much navigating a puzzle as turning yourself into a human cannonball and praying you can slap a series of reflex touches perfectly.

In the end, I enjoyed this game. There were little nit-picky problems.. the levels don’t perfectly reset when you die so on some levels you can never get yourself moving in an exact consistent rhythm with the laser beams. The hoppy movement of your character is always kind of annoying – you’re either an elite ninja navigating impossible laser beam patterns and chasms, or you’re a lemming that randomly leaps off cliffs while trying to take a step forward.

The challenge got a little repetitive towards the end, in the sense that they were all hyper-quick series of Z and spacebar taps that you had to learn… but the difficulty was consistent and thankfully they kept each level short so you never get really burnt out navigating more than 2 hard problems in one sequence.

A neat little game, a B+, solid at what it’s trying to do, but not very deep.