[b]something ate my alien[/b] is kinda like [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/252410/]steamworld dig[/url], but instead of a sci-fi western setting, the story is about an evil alien pirate capturing your ship (as in you, the ai on the ship), demanding loot, so you have to send your aliens down to various planets to gather resources and free yourself.
the [b]gameplay loop[/b] is this: teleport to planet, mine minerals and such while killing enemies standing in your way, watch your oxygen, open doors, solve puzzle rooms with gravity-affected sokoban-like puzzles, and when your backpack's full, teleport back to your ship, maybe unlock an upgrade or weapon with the resources, then do it again. further runs can be started from any discovered teleporter and there's a neat map showing or filtering out various things. the main goal is to grab enough ransom items to satisfy the pirate, with the optional goal of discovering, mining and collecting absolutely everything on all [b]4 planets[/b].
each location has various resources and enemies to deal with, some known, some to be discovered. the former can be gathered by simply exploring and digging around with your laser, and of course enemies come in all varieties: moving, flying, stationary, shooting, jumping, exploding, multiplying, and many variations of these and others. needless to say, they keep respawning as you move around and can be quite a nuisance.
being the hardcore gamer I am, I skipped zen difficulty and went straight to easy. puzzles are the same, but I didn't need extra stress from boss fights or running out of oxygen too fast, plus easy has fewer enemies and more hp and oxygen drops from them, and [b]difficulty can be changed anytime[/b] anyway, meaning I could've still gone down to zen if the going got tough.
[b]saving only happens when you teleport back to the ship[/b], quitting loses progress in the current run, and if you die, gotta do a corpse run to grab the dropped loot. always hate this, but depending on your skill and the difficulty setting, it might not even happen. I only died twice and one was from fall damage, but can't imagine how annoying enemies and hazards can be on higher difficulties.
besides going back to base, health can be replenished by mining heart crystals, which can't be stored, so don't mine them if you don't need a boost. oxygen can be refilled from oxygen stations, and just like hearts, there's a limited number of them with a limited amount of oxygen, but on easy I never had to worry about it. fuel is used for jumping and it only limits height, as it recharges as soon as you land somewhere. weapons don't use ammo as such, but some can't be used indefinitely, have to give them a few-second break.
[b]the puzzle aspect is also strong in the game.[/b] as you stumble around the planets, you'll run into no less than [b]47 puzzle rooms[/b], with the occasional bonus of figuring out how to get inside. they're all [b]block-pushing (and pulling) situations[/b], have to get the colored blocks to their place, but of course gravity is a thing, you need a place to stand on to move stuff around, and so on. no oxygen use inside, nor enemies or fall damage, not even on insane mode, so they're truly all about puzzling (except the final area, enemies appear inside even on easy).
[b]no undo[/b] in a sokoban-like would be reason enough for a thumbs down, but it's not too bad here, room reset is quick, as is movement and digging, especially with an upgraded mining laser. while it's still annoying when you push instead of pull or dig out the wrong block, most of the puzzles can be done pretty quickly once you figure out how to do what you have to do, though that might take a while, a few of them are tricky. and while I can see colors just fine, distinguishing between yellow and green pieces was sometimes a bit hard, wasn't a good idea to have both in the same puzzles.
solving a room spawns a reward chest with various resources and a token, the key to unlocking other planets and weakening planet bosses, or 'somethings', as the game calls them. they appear briefly after every room when the chest is opened, but can't be damaged until all the tokens are found, so gotta benny hill a bit to avoid damage. [b]once all 10 puzzle rooms are solved, the next time you teleport down, the boss spawns and it has to be killed to unlock the next planet.[/b] again, on easy it shouldn't be an issue, let alone on zen, I imagine, though the third was a little annoying and the final one a bit more involved.
[b]controls are straightforward and completely rebindable[/b] (keyboard and mouse and controller both supported), and besides various difficulties, there are tons of other settings, including but not limited to separate volume sliders (you can get rid of annoying gibberish or even mining sounds), resolutions, windowed mode, v-sync, brightness, colorblind mode, screen shake, ui scaling, etc. these are all available while playing as well, parts of the ui can also be toggled, and the minimap can be extended to full screen and filters work there as well.
my biggest gripe is how dark most of the screen is and there's no 'darkness toggle' to get rid of it. I get that it's deliberate, but it wastes most of the screen space, makes puzzle rooms harder to take in, and adds nothing whatsoever to the experience, even though you can see silhouettes and stuff, so it's not like a lazy mobile port running in portrait mode. other than that, fantastic presentation, excellent music, lots of attention to detail, [b]everything is done in an exemplary fashion[/b]. it's a shame puzzles can't be replayed after the game is completed though.
I had serious crashing issues, but the developer mostly fixed it eventually, despite based on reports I was pretty much the only one with this problem. not many people are this dedicated to their own games these days. [b]completion time should be around 10-12 hours[/b], more if you get stuck on some puzzles and/or decide to clear up every planet, but I didn't bother with that, it's just busywork. [b]highly recommended[/b] if you don't mind exploration, mining, light platforming and as light as you want it to be combat between puzzles.
