Hey, what do you know, there's a character limit for topic subject lines.
I'm surprised nobody has posted about this game yet! The designer, who goes variously by Anna Anthropy,
Auntie Pixelante, and Dessgeega, is responsible for several well-regarded Knytt Stories levels, including Fossil, The Oubliette, and Under the Crack. And her latest game is an exploration-heavy, non-linear platformer firmly in the tradition of Nifflas games like Knytt and Knytt Stories, and their old-school platformer forerunners including Metroid.
Redder casts you as a tiny, pixel-art astronaut who's forced to make a landing on Mars (or some other red planet? But I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a reference to it being meant as Mars on the designer's blog... if, perhaps, an
old-old-school, pulp-SF sort of Mars) when your spaceship runs out of fuel.
Screenshot links (they're links instead of emedded so as not to steal her bandwidth; Dessgeega's been posting choice screenshots from Redder throughout its development, and only stopped once the game was released):
one leftfour left, two down (outside)
four right, one down (inside)
five right, four down (not every screen is dominated by red!)
four left, seven down (green seems to be the secondary colour after red)
one right, five down (there's also some soothing, earthy brown)
five right, eight down (try and tell me that falling animation isn't adorable)
two left, nine down (classy)
six left, nine down (busy)
All the screenshots are described by their position in relation to the starting screen -- that's Anna Anthropy's choice, not mine, so if you feel that would be too spoilery for you, don't follow the links
The controls are your basic, simple-platformer left, right, jump. Holding the jump button (I was using the arrow keys; I neglected to check for wasd or any other control scheme, but up-arrow definitely works) prolongs your jump in a way that feels right for a comparatively low-gravity planet. You don't get as much horizontal jump distance as you do vertical, but the controls are simple enough that you'll get the hang of what you can and can't do quickly.
Savepoints are generously scattered through the game -- at least, they are while you're still fairly close to the starting point; I haven't beaten the game yet -- and triggered when you go past one with the astronaut touching it, though they're usually (?) easily jumped over should you prefer not to save your game there.
You'll need those savepoints, as there are a variety of things that will kill your astronaut and send you back to the last savepoint used. In addition to at least two kinds of switches which change the game state in ways you'll easily figure out so that you can get past switchable obstacles, there are at least one kind of passive-death danger, one kind of moving enemy and one kind of automated-intermittently-firing weapon that can each warp you back to that last savepoint if you should come in contact with them.
The intro sequence shows your spaceship's "fuel gauge" as a slowly emptying grid of glowing, diamond-ish energy crystals. The goal of the game, beyond exploration for exploration's sake and not-dying, seems to be collecting replacement crystals so that you can presumably take off again. (The "green" screenshot linked above contains one of the crystals.) Despite the lack of text instructions, everything in the game seems to be either immediately straightforward, or something quickly learned after you get warped back to your last save point.
By all indications it's a good-sized game, with plenty to explore -- the designer says it's her largest game ever -- though not huge on the scale of Knytt. Jaded platformer players may find it too easy; LoCP members like me will find it challenging, but not necessarily unplayably so. Whatever your skill level, though, Redder is old-school fun.
Play Redder here (at Newgrounds)
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