As you may have heard, the 7th game by indie developer, ProdigalSon has arrived and I couldn't be happier. Buddy System might seem simple on the surface, but it's not afraid to let robots drop their one remaining battery into a pit forever or throw it at a wall to shatter, leaving these sentient machines in a persistent state of limbo, until god knows when somebody will come save them. Where are these robots? Why are they alone? How long will this battery last? If you drop the battery and the level resets, are you in doing so, creating multiple parallel universes of your failings, where robot after robot with unalienable rights just like their human brethren will sit motionless, incapable of rich, inner experiences, deprived of all joy. With not a single thought in their cybernetic matrix. Unable to even ponder if it had not been better had they never existed at all. Just sitting there like a husk until the end of time?
Any experienced gamer will pick up the mechanics of the wall plates. My main struggle was figuring out which part of the walls I should hurl the battery towards. Though, I would attribute this difficulty to the fact that I was never very good a billiards. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I hurled a battery and it happened to come into contact with a conveyor belt by accident and moved exactly where I had wanted it to go. I had expected the conveyor to move the robot, but not the battery due to the normal trajectory.
Buddy System can be deeply satisfying and frustrating. It's thrilling when you complete a level and everything falls in to place neatly. There were a few levels where I couldn't get the wall bounce quite right and robot after robot was sacrificed to the ProdigalSon multiverse. All in all it was a great game. Keep up the good work!