Within a Deep Forest

"Two attempts have been made to build a bomb, capable of freezing the entire world. The first was a failure, and resulted in a living blue ball. The second attempt was a success. Now the clock is ticking, and the world is in grave danger. That is, unless..."

That was my first encounter with game creator Nifflas. I saw that this game is a platformer and it's free, which back then (around 2005) was a rarity, so I thought I'd give it a try. What I quickly realized was that it's also a quite excellent game.

The presentation is quite lovely, with nice pixelly graphics, lite but very functional tilesets for the platforms, dreamy backgrounds and chilly music as soundtrack. Hell, the music alone gets a thumb up; I wish more people would use tracks like these in games instead of the typical pseudo retro horsecrap tunes people did back in the 80s (and they did those because they had no better audio capabilities in computers anyway). Paying homage to that era is all fine and dandy, but goddamn it, does every platform game has to use that? (</rant> :)).

Game mechanics is also spot on. Initially you can explore only so much of the world, because the ball has limited capabilities. However, as you collect power ups, the ball becomes able to reach parts of the world unaccessible by that point (because there were some platforms out of reach, or required a more durable ball and so on). It definitely had me hooked pretty fast, and I would take long sessions playing it. That's always good!

I wonder how come I haven't mentioned this game from the start of the thread. I suck. In any case, get downloading and playing!