Took lots of notes for myself recording my thoughts as I played through this little game. Here they are:
- Hell yes, custom noun. It’s such a small thing but every time I see a game use one cleverly it ticks a tiny check box for me. “Run Nothing” is an excellent one.
- Main menu:
- Cool to see the game comes with controller support! Yours is actually the first entry I’ve played so far that does.
- Also, nice.
- Dang, that music is a really good vibe. Really fond of the choice to use gentle piano music instead of the more uptempo spacey synths I'd sort of expect from this kind of game; putting that at odds with the flying spikes and swarms of enemies coming at you gives a really cool feeling the whole time you’re playing of this being just one little piece of a larger universe that doesn’t care about you; you’re nothing, and that’s kind of nice. Same goes for the jellyfish which as far as I can tell you can’t do anything about but avoid. Dudes are in their lane, unbothered, thriving.
- Similar thing goes for the background changing every time; it’s a little thing, but it does so much for the vibe.
- Having to catch your projectile is a really neat mechanic, and I enjoy that it can also keep damaging enemies as it flies — it feels pretty great to just toss it it once and then keep running around dodging and kiting enemies into it. I didn’t realize at first though that once you’ve thrown it you can’t stab anymore, either. Which makes for some fun incentive to try to face enemies head-on with the stabbing as much as you can so as not to leave yourself defenselessly running around trying to grab your projectile without getting Killed Dead
- To that end, I did wish for a bit more range with the stabby spike sometimes as it felt like I always had to wait for enemies to get just a little too close for comfort and by the time they reached me within such close range they were joined by their other pals attacking from other angles that I couldn’t turn to stab fast enough, but that could very well just be me needing to git gud.
- The asteroids breaking apart when you hit them looks really neat, but it took me a couple runs to figure out what’s going on with the asteroids when it breaks apart; when I first hit it and saw it break into a bunch of smaller asteroids I assumed that they would still damage me, and that therefore I should avoid trying to hit them because it would make things harder — or, alternately, that I could try strategically to hit them to kill a bunch of enemies at once.
- I really enjoy the little touch with the enemies bouncing off/pathfinding around? the asteroids.
- Looping across space took a sec to get used to; the fact that it mirrors both horizontally and vertically, as far as i can tell, really messed with me for some reason and I kept showing up where I didn’t expect to. But that’s not exactly a bad thing -- it adds to the experience, I think, to have that brief feeling of disorientation that as you keep playing you eventually learn to work with and anticipate.
- Final note: I think I found a super minor bug where, if you die right on the border of the void, the enemies freak out trying to figure out where you are and end up having a fun little flip-along-the-y-axis dance party. Which, tbf, was kind of hilarious honestly.
Final, final note: This game was supposed to be a love story?? Say more! Is there another spike-shooting octopus-lookin' little dude out there in the void somewhere?