![]() The occasional secret and branching path keeps your brain working a little bit, but not too much. Like Dig Dog and Downwell before it, you can pick up color schemes to change the palette, a purely aesthetic choice but a fun collectible (some are quite horrid). The 1-bit graphics are so well executed that I stopped noticing them after a minute or two - the pixel art is very clear and only rarely does the lack of color cause any confusion whatever. It’s a non-stop romp where you always have a goal or an obstacle to overcome. Gato Roboto isn’t as taxing or complex as its predecessors, but it’s not really meant to be. ![]() (If you haven’t played the Switch remake, Blaster Master Zero, I implore you to.) In this respect it’s a bit like Blaster Master, in which your pilot could dismount and explore caves in top-down fashion - an innovation that made the game one of my favorites for the system. However, you frequently have to jump out of it to get into a smaller tunnel or enter water, in which the suit can’t operate (and the cat only barely). The idea is that you’ve crash-landed on a planet after tracking a mysterious signal, but the spaceman aboard the ship is trapped - you play his cat, Kiki, who must explore the planet in his stead.Īt first (or shall I say fur-st) you really are just a cat, but you’re soon equipped with a power suit that lets you jump and shoot like any other action game. This one isn’t as big and open as recent popular “metroidvanias” like Hollow Knight or Ori and the Blind Forest - it’s really much more like a linear action-adventure game in the style of metroidvanias. In Gato Roboto, as in those games, you explore a large world filled with monsters and tunnels, fighting bosses and outfitting yourself with new abilities, which in turn let you explore the world further. Gato Roboto, for Switch and PC, is a much more complicated game, though not nearly so much as its inspirations, the NES classics Metroid and Blaster Master. He made a video about the process here, if you’re curious: If I had been told I couldn’t type any more, I’d probably just take up a new career, so I admire Rusty Moyher for his tenacity. ![]() ![]() A repetitive stress condition made it painful and inadvisable for him to code using the keyboard, so he uses a voice-based coding system instead. Interestingly, Dig Dog was developed by its creator with only minimal use of his hands. It’s a great time-waster and you won’t exhaust its challenges for hours of gameplay it’s also very easy to pick up and play a few stages of, since a whole life might last less than a minute. So even when you die, and you will die a lot, you feel like you’re working towards something. It gives a sense of progression even when you only get a bone or two, as does your dog rocketing back upwards in a brief but satisfying zoomies celebration every time. The rest is down to moment-to-moment choices: dig around that enemy or go through them? If I go this way will I trap myself in this hole? Is it worth attacking that bat nest for a coin or will it be too hard to get out alive?Ĭollected bones contribute towards unlocking new stages with different, more dangerous enemies and devious traps. The simple controls let you jump, dig, and do a midair dash that kills enemies - that’s pretty much it. These coins can be traded with a merchant who appears on some stages, offering various gameplay perks like a longer dash or higher jump. ![]() On every stage you’re tasked with collecting a bone that’s somewhere near the bottom, while avoiding various types of enemies and traps or, if you so choose, destroying them and occasionally yielding coins. Dig Dug is the obvious callback in the name, but gameplay is more bouncy and spontaneous rather than the slower, strategic digging of the arcade classic. In the latter game, you play as a dog, digging for bones among a series of procedurally generated landscapes populated by enemies and hazards. This is a limitation that frees the developer from certain concerns while also challenging them to present the player with all the information they need with only two colors, or in Dig Dog’s case a couple more (but not a lot). Not only that, but the latter was developed in a fascinating and inspiring way.īoth games share a 1-bit aesthetic that goes back many years but most recently was popularized by the inimitable Downwell and recently used to wonderful effect in both Return of the Obra Dinn and Minit. Drawing inspiration from games of yore but with dog and cat protagonists that signal light adventures rather than grim, dark ones, Gato Roboto and Dig Dog are easy to recommend to anyone looking to waste a couple hours this weekend. ![]()
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