You may think one look at Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet tells you all you need to know. "Oh look, another monochrome, artsy fartsy downloadable game" you might sigh, your cynical side winning you over, "Must be this year's Limbo". But, as a wise man one said, you should never judge a book by its cover - and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is a great reason why.
Where Limbo tried to make things fun by tricking you into dying, repeatedly, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (hereon referred to as ITSP, seeing as it's got a stupidly long name) takes a slightly different tack. There's not even all that much of a storyline here - in fact, it's not entirely obvious what's going on at all, even after watching the intro, but it's a heck of a lot of fun regardless. All you need to know is that ITSP is a side-scrolling adventure game, that puts you in charge of a little alien in a spaceship, with an entire planet to explore at your own free will.
For a game with such a limited colour palette, it's actually quite vibrant.
There's obviously been a lot of work gone into making the game feel as free form as possible, as you're rarely sent down a set path, or even given an objective. Although there's always a marker, showing you where you should be heading next, you don't have to go there straight away, and there's a fair amount of freedom in the route you take, too. Exploration here is encouraged, and, in fact, the game would be rubbish without it. Exploring here is fun, and with a handy map showing you the areas you've explored - and any important pick-ups you've missed - you can plan your way around fairly well. Of course, not every cave, chamber, and secret's available to you to begin with, with plenty of road blocks and obstacles often requiring you to come back later when you've upgraded your ship, or got a different weapon - but hunting out the road blocks, and then coming back to them later on is a large part of the fun. With a bizarre, hostile, and, well, shadowy world waiting to be explored, you set off in your little spaceship looking for adventure - and coming up against some tough puzzles along the way.
Although it may be small, your spaceship's well equipped for taking on any challenges it may come across. Your primary weapon - a scanning beam - is your eye into the world around you, as, at least to begin with, you'll be scanning everything you come across to figure out how you can interact with it. Scan an item, and a prompt will pop up, telling you what you need to use in order to interact with it - or simply warning you to avoid it, if it'll damage your ship. At least to begin with, you have few ways to actually effect the environment around you - but as you progress through the game, and collect extra weapons, you soon start to have a bit more freedom.
At its core, ITSP is actually a puzzle game, and one that'll leave your brain tingling. Somewhat unusually for a game based around space, aliens, and sci-fi, it's actually lateral thinking you'll need the most, if you want to solve many of the puzzles. One of the most useful tools you'll have at your disposal is your handy robotic arm. Controlled with the right analogue stick, whether you're digging away a pile of rubble, in order to squeeze through a tight gap, and access an underwater cave, or, in a more elaborate puzzle, free bubbles of air, which then float up, and get trapped beneath a giant jellyfish, eventually giving it enough buoyancy to make it float to the surface, and moving it out of the way, each utility at your disposal has numerous ways they can be used, and figuring things out, and thinking your way through a puzzle, is both rewarding, and a lot of fun.
Things can seem a bit... daunting, at times.
Each of the weapons you pick up is vastly different to the others - and many of the puzzles require them to be used in different ways. Rockets can be fired against gems, which then vibrate, and shatter the ice that's clinging to them, and was blocking your path; your shield can be used as protection to get your ship past a pocket of acidic water, gaining you access to another, previously unexplored cave; and, my personal favourite, the chainsaw, can be used to either chop away at fragile rock, or form a powerful deterrent for any enemy that dares come near.
Of course, this being a hostile, alien environment, you're not alone in your travels. As you pilot your ship through the dank caves, ambiguous silhouettes will be swaying towards your ship - and some of them are actually out to get you. Snake-like silhouettes grab you with their Jar Jar Binks style tongues, and hook you, pulling you in; bats simply fly at you to deal damage; while other, boss creatures, offer a much more terrifying, and difficult challenge.
However, sadly, in ITSP, the combat just isn't up to par with the rest of the game. While most of the enemies fall by the side of your standard laser, there are too many enemies that are too powerful, or simply too frustrating. With no health bar, it can be difficult to even judge how damaged you are. Your spaceship does start to disintegrate as you take damage, but again, it's tiny, and there are only a few levels of damage. The difference between 15% and 5% health, for example, is likely non-existent.
Similarly, some of the enemies are the absolute spawn of Satan. Whoever thought it was a great idea to introduce a rocket launching enemy to the game, who, not only fire four homing missiles at you, but are also impossible to kill (literally - they simply collapse for a few seconds, then get straight back up), needs stringing up, firing, or preferably both.
One puzzle sees you having to transport a set of bombs from one room to another, which you then have to deposit into one of a series of strange tubes, that suck in air, and take it to a giant monster. That seems straight forward enough in itself - the only problem being, your target room contains not one, not two, but THREE of these rocket launching creatures - and by the time you've gone to fetch the bomb, and brought it back, they'll all have come back to life again, and be training their rockets on you. Sounds fun, doesn't it? The amount of times we tried to do this, only to get hit by a missile just as we're about to place the last bomb in the last tube, we can't remember. Either way, it was far too many, especially for a puzzle that's only around a quarter of a way into the game. Sadly, random difficulty spikes like this do occur on occasion throughout the game, but while they're intermittent, they're likely enough to stop many who would otherwise enjoy the game from completing it - which kind of begs the question, why are they in there in the first place? Especially in a game that costs £10. These kind of mistakes simply aren't on.
Boss fights can be particularly tricky. This one asks you to fire a missile into the boss, down that red tube. It's as hard as it sounds.
A lot of effort's gone into making you feel small, alone, and basically, like an explorer on an uncharted world - an alien planet, that you discover as you go along. As you progress through the heart of the world (regularly checking your map to see where you have and haven't explored), you'll be discovering entire ecosystems of creatures, a wide variety of enemies, and vastly differing puzzles. Coming up against an obstacle, having no idea how to get past it, and then coming back a few minutes later, having picked up a new weapon, and figured out exactly what you're meant to do is a great feeling, and one of the true high points of the game. When you're solving puzzles, and making progress, it's easy to forget about the poor combat, and strange difficulty spikes, as the addictive puzzle solving keeps you coming back for more.
Or, at least, it would, if there were that much of it. You see, the problem is, for all its fancy artwork, hidden collectibles, and great exploring feel, ITSP is incredibly short (around 3 to 4 hours, if you explore lots, and die lots). As a 1200 Microsoft Point game (around £10), and part of the Summer of Arcade promotion, that's not what we were hoping for, but possibly what we were expecting. Unlike Limbo before it, however, there's more to ITSP than meets the eye. This isn't an art project that does a bad job of masquerading as a game. It's an adventure, a brain teaser, a journey into another world, and one that only your mind can help you through.
That, and some decent analogue stick skills, and a heck of a lot of patience.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
