When it comes to indie games, once you’ve played as many as I have you begin to realize that there’s a good deal of value in simple novelty. Ultimately many genres and styles of play can only differentiate themselves so much, so having a hook that helps your game to stand out in some more peripheral way can sometimes make all the difference. That said, some novel ideas are obviously far better and more interesting than others, so just because a game offers up something nobody else does, won’t necessarily mean there isn’t a reason for that fact.

Aside from having a name with some special characters in it that are sure to make finding info on the game a challenge in the first place, the developers here took a daring leap of faith into a world of more complex mathematical concepts being used as a means to solving in-game puzzles. Hardly a luddite myself, having dabbled in math on through Calculus 2 waaaay back in my high school and college days, I was generally pretty hip to it all, but that doesn’t make it all seem any less risky as your game’s most defining element. Granted, you can muscle your way through most of these puzzles with simpler brute force logic, or try to make use of the game’s hints, but once a bunch of numbers and symbols start showing up I can see a portion of the audience out there deciding this won’t be their cup of tea.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the general controls and platforming action are merely middling at best. There’s an awkward jerkiness to your movements, lacking much in the way of subtlety, and in places with smaller platforms that can then be needlessly troublesome. Even simpler actions like trying to grab objects to put in place feels a little more clunky than the average competition, and there’s just something odd about the way elements interact with each other and the environment in places. It’s hardly crippling, but again even relatively small frustrations can tend to add up over time. In spirit I love the audacity of this idea, I just wish that all aspects of play had been better implemented, so it wasn’t quite as easily dismissed on more than one level.