pfister_ - n+ -- one hour review
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n+ -- one hour review
N, by Metanet Software, is a minimalist, plotless platformer, and one of the indie game development scene's big success stories. It started out as a Flash game and worked its way up to commercial release on the Xbox Live Arcade platform as "N+," which is the version I'm playing.
0:00 Chip music and pixel art. I'm actually getting a little burnt-out this aesthetic -- I think maybe it was No More Heroes that did it for me. I recognize the pixel art as pragmatic, but with modern tools, chip music is always a deliberate aesthetic. You can trigger any sample from your note data, so why pick a square wave? Because it automagically triggers a wave of nostalgia in anyone who grew up in the 1980s, that's why.
0:02 On the other hand, the game counting levels from 0 rather than 1 still gets a smile from me.
0:04 Basic platforming mechanics. The minimalist art style -- actually not particularly pixelated in the game world itself -- makes it clear that this is going to be a game that's all about the platforming, be it puzzles or action challenges.
0:06 The wall-slide and wall-jump mechanics are right out of Super Mario Sunshine or New Super Mario Bros.
0:07 ... except that in those games, gravity wasn't weak enough that you could climb a wall by repeatedly jumping off of it and air-steering yourself back towards it. The controls are really floaty.
0:10 The rest of the tutorial goes through a bunch of platformer design staples like places you want to go, places that kill you, and places that help you go other places. An interesting example of the last is a springboard that can bounce you high enough that you die in the fall if you don't catch yourself on something -- sliding down a wall to reduce your momentum is good enough.
0:14 You're scored by the amount of time you have left when you exit a level, but there are also collectibles that increase your time left. That makes even the most trivial-to-beat level an interesting optimization puzzle: when do you go after collectibles, and when do you just head right for the exit?
0:17 You automatically slide down a slope you stand on, and you gain extra height on your jump while running up a slope. They should've just put your avatar on a unicycle, like in Rocket: Robot on Wheels. Would've saved them animation effort, too.
0:19 This level is shaped like a Cactuar. The title is "sabot-n-der." I don't get it!
0:20 This level is called "stop all the downloadin'." Which I do get, but I don't see the connection to the level itself.
0:22 Oh, I guess that's the end of the demo. Hrm. Well, guess I can play the available levels again to try to beat my old times.
0:25 Yipes, where was that gun last time I played this level?
0:26 It's a patrolling turret. Turrets don't feel right to me in a platformer. Not sure why yet.
0:27 Well, I'm pretty sure I beat my previous best time for that episode, but the game doesn't tell me what my previous best was. I guess that's a feature of the full version.
0:29 For a while I was annoyed that there wasn't a "restart level" selection in the pause menu, but now that I look around more they actually dedicate a face button to it. Nice.
0:37 I spent way too long trying to get a decent time on that level. It's a big open space with springy-blocks and coins scattered around, where you're always flirting with the line between moving efficiently and moving so fast that you die when you hit where you're going. And the object placement did not imply a best or even good route, so I ended up playing in a fairly meandering fashion, stopping when I found a local optimum. Not particularly satisfying.
0:42 I think I beat my previous best time for that episode by a substantial amount too, but again, I can't tell you how substantial.
0:43 Looking at the leaderboards I'm still far below the top scores. There's an interface to watch videos of the top-scoring episode playthroughs, which is pretty awesome, but they won't actually let me watch unless I purchase the game. Prince of Persia Classic supposedly had that feature too, but every recording I actually tried to watch was broken in some way, so forgive me if I don't believe that N+ actually has this feature until they prove it to me.
0:51 The tutorial levels are pretty satisfying to optimize as well, but I could really do without all the tutorial text flashing up on replays.
0:53 Remember when I said that it was an interesting optimization decision to either go after coins or go right to the exit? The level designs have been such that it almost always makes sense to go after every coin.
0:54 Huh, I see my previous best time in the tutorial episodes. Maybe it was a bug that it didn't show up in the regular episodes, rather than only being a feature of the full version.
0:56 When I hit "retry level" on the end-of-level screen, it asks me "Are you sure you want to quit your current game session?" That doesn't sound like what I asked for, but hitting "yes" does what I wanted anyways.
Would I play this game for more than an hour? Probably not. The focus on optimization engages my gamer OCD, but the gameplay itself isn't very compelling and there's no actual content to tempt me to press on.
I actually have a lot of respect for the decision to focus solely on gameplay over content, but I happen to think the gameplay here is poor. Despite the relative lack of difficulty in the demo levels, the emphasis seems to be on making the game hard rather than fun; the controls are very floaty and imprecise. Also, the videos that play on the "buy now!" screen indicate many more levels with guns shooting at you, including ones that shoot me-seeking missiles. Dodging me-seeking missiles with such an imprecise control scheme is definitely not my cup of tea.
And I still can't articulate why turrets feel wrong in platformers. I think maybe it's because I'm used to the timing puzzles in platformers being visually explicit about where and when it's safe and not safe to be. But with a turret, there's a whole swath of unsafe territory that is only implied, not visually demarcated. If they rendered the turret's FOV, that might be a different story.
Tags: one hour review
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