Out There Somewhere
Platform: PC/Steam,
Developer: MiniBoss, EQ Games
Premise: After crashing on an unknown planet, you must find a way to get your ship working again to continue your pursuit of Grigori, who's...bad...I guess.
Release Date: 14/03/2016
Out There Somewhere is a Metroid/Vania retro-stylised platformer. On paper, it sounds like it would be a good game: taking inspiration from Cave Story (A Good Game), Super Metroid (A Good Game) and Portal (A Really Good Game). In practice it's still good, but a lot of the mechanics aren't quite as polished as they could be if it weren't a pile of mechanics from vastly different games Frankenstein-ed together. It's also a bit short, but I find myself constantly falling back on the argument of "what can you expect for $1.99?" in these reviews.
Let's talk about the tutorial. One of the core mechanics is that once you shoot the teleporter gun, it has travel time, meaning that if you jump just before it hits a wall you can get additional height out of it. However, the first time it's brought up you aren't given any indication as to how you're supposed to go about doing this, or even that it's what you're supposed to do. On another occasion, you're put in an alien village and told that the way forward is a tunnel under one of the houses. However, you cannot enter any of the houses except one which look exactly like the rest except it doesn't have a hit-box. I only found the way forward by accidentally falling into the hole while walking past the house that had the tunnel under it. I get that a game claiming to be Metroid/Vania without central exploration elements is like a cake without icing but it would be nice if I was given any indication as to how I'm supposed to use the central exploration elements.
There are also one or two issues with what passes for combat; there's one enemy who shoots big missiles at you, which explode against either the first wall it hits or your squishy flesh and then emit a dust-cloud-like after effect. This wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that the dust cloud (the animation of which lasts for around three seconds at point of impact) also has a hit box, so bumping into the dust cloud kills you just as effectively as the explosion that preceded it, which ended up causing around 2/3 of my deaths at the hands of that enemy.
I'd also like to poke at the story, specifically the main villain Grigori who we're never really given an adequate reason for hunting down outside of "because that's what makes the game progress forward". There's an offhanded line at the start about how he's an "enemy of the fleet", but no sense is given as to what he did to so offend them. The local populace of Planet: Unknown seem happy enough to hasten his departure the second the player asks so he must have done something bad to them, the game just doesn't find the time in between increasingly frustrating puzzles to tell us what.
Speaking of the puzzles difficulty brings me to my last gripe. Occasionally the layout of the puzzles can get difficult to work with, insomuch as there are several examples where the solution to the puzzle is relatively easy to figure out but unnecessarily difficult to put into practice. The main example I'll use here is a room where the answer was simply to jump, fire when falling, then jump again as the bolt hit to make it over the edge. However, the platform in question was placed about 3 pixels too high to reasonably jump over it, and the timing necessary to complete the puzzle and continue ended up being infuriatingly specific.
Now that I've gotten the negatives out of the way, let's take a look at its more redeeming features: the puzzles may be difficult, but they rely on an interesting and cleverly-implemented set of core mechanics that you'll be more familiar with the workings and layout of than the back of your hand by the end of the game. There's a really cool mechanic throughout that really brings out the Metroid/Vania elements where if you find eleven cores throughout the game and turn them in to an NPC towards the end, it upgrades your ship to make the final boss fight with Grigori easier. I'll admit that I never got to use this mechanic because frankly, I had no idea how to even start going for some of those cores even before they start throwing points of no return at you towards the end, but it sounded like a good idea. If anyone here plays it and manages to get all the cores, feel free to let me know how the last fight actually changes.
The visual style is also quite well done, going for the retro-pixel art type of visuals that a lot of Indie games tend to opt for, but with a slightly darker colour palette due to most of the game being set either at night or inside tunnels and caves. The music also fits into the same school of retro aesthetic as the visuals, mostly consisting of chiptunes (Which I feel I should clarify isn't a bad thing, given that they're quite good chiptunes).
In summary, if you're a fan of incredibly difficult Metroid/Vania platformer games with retro aesthetics and/or Portal, then I whole-heartedly recommend picking up Somewhere Out There. If not, I'd still recommend it, albeit with slightly less commitment to making sure that you agreed with the suggestion.
As always, anyone who has a suggestion for a review, rant topic, or just wants to say "hi!", can do so by emailing me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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