Game:

Pac-Man (1980)

Category:

Review

Duration: 20:23

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"Did you ever wonder what happens to the toffee pennies that are always left over in a box of Quality Street? Well, they eventually end up in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, and that's where you, Tardigrade, come in. You are an extremophile wandering the cosmos looking for your favourite food, which fortuitously is the Quality Street toffee penny..."

This is a gravity based game where you will automatically fall to the ground unless you use your thrust, if you hit a wall you will be bounced back and get out of course. On each level you have to collect all the toffee pennies. This will open the exit door and you then have to reach this before the air runs out. When you take the final toffee penny the air depletes faster, so it might be a good tactics to always take the toffee closest to the exit as the last one if possible.

There will be deadly spikes, some are static while other moves, and in some levels you will become history if you touch any of the walls (these levels is off course made as a labyrinth). A lot of enemies is also going to make your quest tough. At the first levels the enemies will move in patterns but lin ater levels they will go directly after you. Especially an enemy very similar to Eugene from Manic Miner will come to cause you a lot of trouble!

Besides being a game based on skills and narrow maneuvers, where your extremophile always is losing height if you do not hit the thrust pedal, the game also have puzzle elements. The puzzles will not give you any headache, because you simply need to flick some levers to open up doors, but these levels will be longer as you can not take the shortest route here.

This is a good and challenging game, and it is not easy to beat. Especially some of the last levels (surprise, surprise...) are very tough, but luckily you have unlimited lives. If you die, this will just count in the "Fails" statistic in the top of the screen, and as this counter goes to 9999 there are room for fails. If you die you will start again from the beginning of the screen where you died.

The game features a start menu, 20 levels and a end of game screen, which is pretty impressive for a 16k game. The game engine is also very good, both the extremophile and the enemies is moving fast and smooth. A very nice new 16k game here.

Tardigrade was submitted for the Cassette 16 Summer Jam Vol2.

The game was made by Dave Hughes in 2021.

Rating = 87%

Download here: https://itch.io/jam/cassette-16-summer-jam-vol2/rate/1137206

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