Overloop

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43083373/]Clever games curator review: 7.5/10[/url] A puzzle platformer set in a vibrant low-res pixel art world with an extensive story, told in-game with minimal cutscenes. The main hook is your ability to create (and control) a clone, which you almost always send to their bloody death. Clones serve multiple purposes, but mostly exist to take the place of crates in other puzzle games: holding down switches, something to jump on, and blocking dangerous things from killing you. The cloning feature is not exactly novel, and on the face of it sounds very similar to the game The Swapper. However, in practice it does not feel derivative, and at most the puzzles overlap slightly with box pushing games. The puzzle difficulty is mostly pretty mild, and primarily comes from executing the solutions, rather than figuring out what to do. That said, it’s a lot more thoughtful than a non-puzzle platformer, and the puzzles nicely break up the “action”. Since neither the action nor the puzzles are that hard this is a moderately casual (but NOT trivial/2d walking sim) kind of game, which means the setting and story are pretty important… Visually, it’s a pixel-art treat, and the art and levels contribute significantly to telling the story. The rest of the storyline comes from in-game dialogue, either with NPCs or PCs (ie computer terminals). It’s at times a bit scattered, which might mean I skipped some of the dialogue by mistake. It’s mostly enjoyable, but does suffer from mashing together most of the popular dystopian storylines of our era, and not very artfully. Maybe pick just TWO ideas and run with that, eh? So overall I enjoyed it, but wasn’t sad when it was over. Short & pleasant. A good game to get on sale and to enjoy promptly before moving on.