50CK3T

Nice puzzle game that isn’t remarkable enough to leave a memorable impression. The game starts when the old inventor passes away after sacrificing his battery to power the robot. The inventor’s final message to the robot is to reach the distant settlement and find someone before the battery loses its last ounce of power. The game follows a robot and its bird companion. Robot is the main character, although you can switch between them at any time. The gameplay relies around overcoming obstacles and platforming sections with your abilities. The main one is your power cord, which may plug into any socket. This somewhat limits you because you can't just hurl it wherever you want. After connecting, you can lift yourself up and swing around. Obstacles are always solved by using both characters. While the bird spends the majority of its time perched on the robot, it can still fly around scouting the stage and pressing switches. The only constraint is the battery. As you move around and perform actions, the battery slowly loses power. If you let it run out, you must restart the stage. Luckily, there are recharge stations at certain points where you also listen to most of the story parts. The game is linear and made out of rooms with obstacles. You always move forward so there’s no need to backtrack or worry about collectibles. A game also saves automatically once you exit a room. Several other mechanics come into play as you make progress. No platformer can do without boxes, so you’ll have to work with those too. You can push and pull them around to create platforms to reach distant sockets, or place them on scales that drops barriers. Crates have weight, so you can’t push more at once. What I like is that you can’t fail a room if you accidentally push a box over the edge. Each puzzle is designed in such a way that it is always solvable. Well, there can be an occasional bug, but it’s extremely rare. Now, while the battery mechanic is unique, it’s also a big problem. Since the battery loses power with each action, you can’t make unnecessary moves. This means that if you fall down from a platform or push a box in one direction instead of the other, you'll most likely run out of juice before getting to the next recharging station. However, what killed the experience for me was not related to gameplay at all. The main issue is that there is no warning notice when you select new game rather than continue. If you do this, the game will restart from level one, and you will lose all progress. It happened to me, and I have no plans to do everything again.