Water is tied to death in the minds of many gamers, so rather than forcing you to figure out that you have to jump in, there's a pair of pipes placed such that it looks like one leads across a gap to the other. This one forces you to try it by placing a button in a place where it's obvious that's the only possible way to get to it. Most games that incorporate parkour won't let you do that. You learn everything your character can do by trying it, and the game is built in such a way that this is not only easy, it's fun.

There is no textual instruction in the game itself. Every detail of this game is intended to get the player to try new things and learn the details of movement, completely organically. It's more forgiving than an empty pit, incentivizes fruitless exploration less than a flat plane, and is just damn beautiful to swim through. You get to see future parts of your environment before they show up. The lack of diversity in textures might have just been a factor of time constraints for the single dev, but it works for him here, as it emphasizes the shape of the environment over its appearance. You don't see crazy lens flares or godrays, choices that I wholeheartedly approve of. The lighting, skybox, and water effects fit together beautifully, It's not overdone, either. Grieshofer has done some very cool things with the lighting here. There's a lot of games where you just steer your movement down to dive, but this isn't one of them, and that sets up a cool moment of discovery later on. Same reasoning as above, with the added bonus that this also lets you dive underwater. You do not want jump mapped to a button you use your thumb for in a game where you need to jump while looking around.Ĭrouch is left bumper. I've even played Mirror's Edge, and I forgot about this detail.

This will make perfect sense to people who have played dedicated 3D platformers like Mirror's Edge, and confuse most other people. Where an amateur would have made a decision that seemed obvious, putting more thought into the little things pays off.

Every single detail takes an aspect of the game that could have been nothing and turns it into something. Refunct is fun for me because it's a super clear demonstration of the developer's understanding of how games work. So why am I even writing about this? It doesn't last more than a half hour or so, there's basically no strategy, and it's trivially easy. The Steam tags get close in 'Relaxing' and 'Parkour.' All you do is run around an expanding series of platforms, and push buttons. This is a bare-bones, short, minimalist game that's a bit hard to define.

Swarmlake