Scrap Garden

[Leisher]

Got this one during the last sale for $1.

Beat it last night in three hours and I was being a completionist.

The story goes that you're a robot who wakes up to find all other robots in your robot world are deactivated. You set out to figure out what happened. The story is light, and something had to have been lost in translation (it's a foreign indy) because there are things that just don't make sense. An activated robot you encounter early on tells you what happened and explains his own ability to continue functioning. However, two minutes later you meet another active robot whose activation is never explained, but he's essentially a merchant asking for crystals and an item about 20 yards away from where he's standing. Even later you meet another robot who was never deactivated, but just ran out of fuel without anyone to give him some, and he ran on fucking gas? Weird. Oh, and did I mention that in this world, that is clearly built for humans, magic is a thing and so is a dragon.

Game play is just running about, jumping to fight the few enemies, and seeing what you can activate. I'm not lying when I say there's one boss creature late that I beat without a single offensive move, and it also never attacked me. Maybe it was a flaw? Maybe I just figured out exactly what to do?

The game's biggest flaws are a shitty camera that is too "loose" and an identity problem. The camera is mostly just annoying, but can actually hinder your attempt to play in certain jumping puzzles. The identity problem comes from the fact that the game just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: top down platformer, side scrolling platformer, racer on rails, puzzle game, and so on. I like seeing things get switched up, but I feel the game's overall unjointed feel might have been a result of this?

Overall, it's a nice game made by two indy makers who were making their first game(?), but I can't recommend it to anyone. Even free I'm not sure anyone here would get anything out of playing it.