Platformer

i saw her standing there is a nice little puzzle platformer with a fairly novel core mechanic and a somewhat disquieting backstory.

You control the player character with WASD or the arrow keys; "up" is a jump. A second (pink, inevitably) character moves toward you when you are sufficiently close; your goal is to guide her to a cage ("I loved her but she was a zombie, so I kept her safe in a cage"). Since she is a zombie, if she touches you, you die and must restart the level; but apparently she doesn't mind being caged, because a heart appears above her when you guide her there.

Not that it's really relevant to gameplay, but why is it that when games go here, the active character is always gendered male? And while I don't have any moral qualms about mutually consensual restraint (in face I, ah... better not go there), this is a pretty disquieting subtext from a gender political point of view.

The zombie-girl cannot jump, and in some levels, if you are not careful, you may guide her into a gap in a platform, causing her to die (and of course you can mistime a jump and do likewise).

As is typical with puzzle games, new puzzle elements are added over time, including risers, enemy zombies that can kill either of you, switchable laser barriers, and "holograms" of you that you can trigger to guide the zombie-girl even if you yourself are not present. There's a tasty combination of solver's uncertainty (the difficulty of solving puzzles) and performative uncertainty (the uncertainty inherent in any skill-and-action game). And the story is carried in tight, evocative texts, two lines on each level, the first displayed on level load and the second when solved. Art style is minimalist, but evocative and appropriate to the game's aesthetic.

Find Me a Good One is a student project from a duo at the Parsons School of Design; as with many student projects, it's quite short. It's a sort of puzzle platformer, though the platforming difficulty is minimal, with hand-drawn, surreal graphics depicting a sort of dreamworld.

The backstory is that your brother is asleep and beset by nightmares; you must enter the dream world to find friendly creatures and bring them back to repel the nightmares. If you don't do so, the nightmares apparently abscond with your brother. But you are not required to do this; you can simply explore the world, and there's no "game over" when your brother goes away.

It's pleasant, but more the germ of an idea than a full game.

Find Me a Good One is a 2012 Indiecade nominee.

Super Adventure Pals is much like a classic SNES platformer, with a strong debt to Super Mario Bros., but executed not with nostalgia but with freshness, as if the genre were still young.

It has an RPG element as well, with characters you talk with between levels who provide quests, and a level-up system that allows you to increase either your combat skill or health with each level. In a nice touch, increasing combat skill changes the look of your weapon, and increasing health changes the color of your hat. The dialog is light and charming, and the story, such as it is, somewhat absurd -- the villain has stolen your beloved pet rock, which is why you're pursuing him.

Robot Taco! Taco! is a nicely tuned puzzle platformer in which you play a robot with a detachable head. When detached, the two can move independently; the head can fly and shoot laser beams to destroy enemies, while the body can jump. If the body jumps into the head as it flies over head, they reconnect, and it becomes a "super jump," allowing access to higher platforms.

Much of the puzzle solving involves using the capabilities of the two items in combination. For example, in the level shown in the illustration here, when the red button is held down, the red barriers are removed, freeing the enemies there; the trick is to position the head to shoot at them before using the body to jump on the button, switching quickly back to the head; you can kill only one of the enemies, the other will approach the body from the other side, so you must switch back to the body and platform up to the head. (The enemies can fall, but not jump, so the other will be trapped at the bottom level.)

Photon Baby is an excellent puzzle platformer, with NES-ish graphics and an interesting puzzle style. You play a little fellow with a sort of gun; while babysitting, the child you were caring for was kidnapped by a vampire bat, and you evidently have to fight through thirty platform levels featuring vampires and bats to get the brat back.

Vampires wear differently colored capes; some surfaces of each level are colored lines. You bullets are gray when fired, but take on the color of one of these lines; and a vampire can only be killed by a bullet the color of his or her cape. This is where the puzzle aspect comes in; you must figure out how to slay each vampire, given the organization of the level, and the positions of the colored lines.

Mr. Condyle's Escape is a good example of the principle that one way to create innovative games is to take mechanics from different game styles and cross them. In this instance, Pierre is creating a platformer -- but one that is turn-based, not based on interface mastery.

A set of tools allow you to plan Mr. Condyle's motion -- moving left or right, waiting, or jumping. Once you have decided on a course of action, you click a "play" button. Mr. Condyle does each action in turn -- and, in turn, cannons fire, platforms move, and so on. In other words, at first you simply try some actions, and watch them play, getting a sense of the timing (cannon 1 fires on turn 2 and every other turn thereafter, for instance). Inevitably, the first time you try to complete a level, you will fail, because you don't understand the timing of events; and it is likely that multiple attempts will be required before success.

Escape Goat is an excellent little puzzle platformer with a sort of NES sensibility and well-crafted levels. About the only bad thing I can say about it is that it's too short -- if you're a skilled platformer, you can get through it in under two hours -- but that is, in its own way, praise.

You play a purple goat who, according to what passes for a story, is attempting to escape from prison, which evidently involves getting through a set of platform levels. The challenge of the game is less in the platforming itself than in puzzle-solving; the controls are crisp and responsive, there's no combat as such, and the main challenges navigational.

The End is an odd beast: a combination of a platformer, a puzzle boardgame, a philosophical investigation of the nature of death, and a variant Myers Brigg map.

Funded by the UK's Channel 4 and developed by Preloaded, it was conceived as a way to engage teens and get them to think about life, death, belief, and science (I kid you not). Naturally, they created a platformer. That's the cynic speaking there; we've seen way too many "serious games" or "games for change" that take a theme and bolt it onto a game style that's totally inappropriate -- like, oh, Debt Ski. Surprisingly, however, The End works, on three different levels simultaneously.

Like Spelunky, A Valley Without Wind is a procedurally-generated platformer, meaning levels are algorithmically generated and no two plays will ever be the same. But Valley is more than a platformer; it has elements of crafting, character advancement with a huge number of paths, and an adventure game-like narrative arc.

Once you complete the tutorial, you start in a town surrounded by many available wilderness squares; you select one, and transition to a sidescrolling level, with monsters to fight and with some elements, like trees and rocks, that you can destroy for resources. But within most wildernesses are buildings and dungeons, each a series of levels in their own right, in which you can find resources that provide you with powerups, or that can be used to craft better spells, or to create "guardian powers."

Sugar Cube is a kawaii-cute platformer -- responsive and well-tuned, with one unique mechanic that makes it interesting.

At various points on the level are hidden items -- often platforms -- that are revealed, and switch "on," only when you pass through or near them. As you move about, the four squares immediately around you are tinted, and show the hidden items. Frequently, there are small "lights" on the screen that show the hidden items, in ghosted form, until turned on; but often, items are revealed only when you activate them. Finally, by holding "shift" while jumping, you can prevent items from "flipping" from active to inactive state.