Lamm

Lamm is a minimalistic black-gray-white puzzle-platformer that looks like Super Meat Boy got lost in Limbo. The game mechanic is a nice fresh take on the 2D platforming genre: you can do zero, single, double, triple or quintuple jumps depending on which power-up orb you last collected – the puzzles are based on figuring out the right sequence of collecting the orbs & pressing buttons to be able to reach the end of the level. The puzzle solving aspect of this game is just as important as the platforming (which can actually be quite challenging in certain levels). There are 6 chapters each containing six levels. To complicate matters, each level contains a firefly, which is always difficult to spot and to reach. You need to collect all fireflies to unlock bonus levels and the final chapter. After completing the final chapter you unlock the game’s ending, which is a single but pretty long and difficult level titled LAMM in which you get a new power: unlimited jumping. The level are optimized for speedrunning and LAMM includes a handy timer, but unfortunately no leaderboards. The game is rather short, but as it is cheap it is worth its price. The soundtrack is very good, composed by MetalRenard, who I had never heard of before. Unfortunately the soundtrack is not available as DLC on Steam and it is also not on Spotify. But you can listen to (for free) and even buy it on https://metalrenardmusic.bandcamp.com/album/lamm-ost. LAMM was great fun to play. I am surprised it is not more well known. If you like Super Meat Boy you will like this game too. The game certainly has replay value if you want try to improve on your own previous best times. However, the game is not without its problems, but they are mostly minor and certainly not deal breakers. - My main grime is that hitboxes around many enemies, especially bullets, are impossibly large – resulting in many deaths that feel unfair. I guess this was necessary to make avoiding the bullets not too easy, but I think it would have been a better option to make the bullets larger. - Scrolling not always feels completely fluent, even though my PC has a GeForce 1080 Ti card. - I had trouble getting my Xbox One controller to work with LAMM. I had to bind the buttons to keyboard keys to get it to work. - Full screen mode did not properly work the first few times I started the game but suddenly it worked (and kept working) just fine.