Escape 51

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I like it when a game has a lot of congruence; some disaster has struck Area 51 and the aliens have broken out of their holding cells. In a bid to subdue the escapees, the guards are turning over the entire lab looking for the runaways and pummelling them in submission when they find them. Queue our hero - a small, tired looking gremlin with no arms. He's got no chance against the guards and must sneak by or suffer the same fate as those caught. The labs are brutalist, dark and chaotic places where the mess left after the disaster provides you with cover, traversal options, and puzzles to solve. The art style of the game is similar to games like Far: Lone Sails or to the lesser known puzzle platformer The Pedestrian, both of which use realistic looking environments to obfuscate the simplicity of the path forward. To give you an idea, roughly 95% of what is on-screen is set dressing. It very much feels like playing through a series of dioramas. That's no bad thing, since the tone of the game is fairly grim when it's not trying to do slapstick, and the choice to embody this all in miniature helps to keep the game lighthearted despite the setting. The only detriments I can mention are animation related and almost certainly a constraint of budget. The guards walk cycle is very stiff and their appearance too rigid. They don't look like they're patrolling as much as they could if they had more variability in their animations. For instance, there's no difference in posture or activity between guards in different areas, even though later in the game it probably should be more obvious to the guards that the clean up isn't going to plan and they should double their efforts. Additionally, your gremlin guy can meet a few gruesome ends in the spikes, gears and blades that make up the hazards through the game, yet when you die it just fades to black; no alien kibble all over the screen. A pity, but an understandable one. Mechanically, it's sometimes difficult to discern where to go. Traversal and puzzle solving really only rely on a few abilities and their uses are signposted distinctly. It's a yellow paint on climbable surfaces, kinda deal here. The only place I can see people getting stuck is, after finding a large creature cage in a theatre, you have to backtrack and throw your arm up to drop a ladder down. It's indicated by an enthusiastic nose-on-legs, but it's not that obvious. I happened to trigger the ladder by accident whilst trying to throw my arm at a nearby guard instead. Other than that, I want to hand out one more demerit for not really having a difficulty curve. The game's challenges do build on one another, but there isn't really much of a jump in challenge from one to the next. There were a handful of times when the timing got a lot tighter (once to avoid a distracted guard by a vending machine, and another to reach a vertical trapdoor), but the difficulty was otherwise largely even throughout. In Conclusion, it's an half hour game and you'll probably not want to breeze through it a second time, but it's also free; the good kind of free where the price is you remembering the name 51 Goobcells Productions for future reference, rather than the bad kind of free where you sell some part of your soul for a dopamine fix. I found it very easy to get into the flow. I wanted to see what happened next, and was quite relieved there were no side quests, collectables, or challenges to distract from the life and death escape attempt our gremlin was involved with. This game probably won't press your whoosh-bang-crikey buttons, but it will give you a nice warm satisfying smugness at having foiled another patrolling guard post with your comically oversized genius alien brain. Bearing in mind the scope... 9/10.