Alien Spidy
A caveat on this review. I don’t have a gaming rig or anything fancy set up. I have a laptop and a touchpad, and am pretty stubborn about switching away from that. I am also just generally bad at platformers. I click buttons at the wrong time, click the wrong button, and just generally do a good job of mucking it all up. The touchpad doesn’t help, but I can’t blame everything on the touchpad - even with a mouse, there’s little hope for me.
But I never let something like actual skill stop me from trying, so gamely, I loaded up this week’s game, Alien Spidy! I was initially delighted. The premise of the game is simple. You’re an alien spider trapped on a planet after your ship crashes, and you need to dodge beasties and obstacles to reassemble your ship and get home to your beloved spider wife. Very straightforward, very cute, and I enjoyed the simplicity of it. The aesthetics and character design in general are fantastic. The colours are bright and high contrast, and this is all very much a world I want to play in. The story of spidy trying to get home isn’t the most compelling, but the smooth animations and fantastic setting are enough to make me want to help the little guy. I dove in.
Literally
I once again reiterate that platformers are not my genre, but there is a difference between “not my genre,” and “45 minutes of nightmare hellscape because the buttons don’t do anything.” I tried. I tried very hard. I cheered when I made it through the tutorial. There were moments where I had slogged away at the same jump for ten minutes, and when I finally made it, I did a victory lap around my room. I tried my very, very best to get spidy home.
This is my personal hell.
I struggled for a while to figure out if the problem was me or the controls, and while I admit it’s probably both, the controls don’t help. In the jump above, for example, the game has helpfully told me what to do. “Press the spacebar,” it encourages. “Then click on the tree.” “Thanks, game,” I say, as I plunge to my death for the fifty-third time, trying to click on the tree. You may also notice that my score is zero. Every time I die, there is a score deduction. There is a minimum score to unlock the next level, and at about the point you died fifty-eight times on the same jump, unlocking the next level starts to seem impossible.
I made it to level two.
I wanted to like Alien Spidy. I tried to enjoy it. The music is fun, the aesthetics are great, and the story of a little spider in a big, big alien world is cute. It’s supposed to be a simple little game of going home.
I did not like Alien Spidy. The controls are impossible, and I spent 45 minutes falling in lakes. It might be a game for people who are better at platformers than me, but I reiterate that I think the controls are more of a problem than just me. I struggled just to get it to register that I did anything, all while spidy sat in despair, realising he would never again see his lady love.
I am so sorry, spidy. I’m sorry.
Developer: Enigma Software Productions
Genre: Indie, Platformer
Year: 2013
Country: Spain
Language: English
Play Time: I Stopped After 45 Minutes, But The Game Is Much Longer Than That.