Out There Somewhere (2012)

• Summary:

Out There Somewhere is a clean, attractive, fun 2D platform puzzler with a unique Portal-like teleporting mechanic. The puzzles are fun and the world and characters are enough to keep you going. However the game is let down by some very odd design choices, abruptly short length and some dips in quality throughout the experience. It's a very cheap $2 game, so I can't be too critical, however I am disappointed because the central puzzle mechanics are truly fun, original and show occasional moments of brilliance, and I feel like these puzzles and ideas could have been expanded much further to make a full-length experience. I can see there was huge potential in this game, but clearly something happened or the developer just lost interest. Still a nice, short, sweet experience and well worth the $2, warts and all.

• Long Version (sorry, I rambled, it's a problem I have)

Out There Somewhere is a $2 game on Steam, and it’s a rather short, simple game and so I’m going to try to keep this review similarly short and sweet. The reason I became interested in this game was because it mysteriously disappeared from the Steam store. People just want what they can’t have, isn’t that the case? Like with Coke Classic, maybe the whole disappearance was an elaborate marketing hoax, haha!

So, the game sets you down on this alien world with very beautiful and neat pixel graphics (though a lot of repeated textures/assets are used). There’s some arbitrary story about being an astronaut and needing parts to repair your ship, and kill the bad guy, blah blah, we’ve heard it all before, and so you embark on your journey. It’s a 2D platformer but with a twist: you fire a special gun, and when this gun hits and obstacle you are instantly teleported to that location. It’s actually reminiscent of Unreal Tournament (1999) which had a similar gun. The gameplay is all about puzzles, and you could say it’s a bit of a 2D portal or something. Each room/area has various obstacles and things. New elements are introduced like mirrors, lasers, pass-through grates, etc. Also, like Portal, momentum is conserved during teleport so this is often used for the puzzles too. All the puzzles were pretty easy, nothing took me longer than a minute or two to solve.

As you explore the planet you bump into little alien locals who want to help you or offer you advice or need saving from cages. These bits of dialogue often give a little bit of comic relief and add some charm and personality to the experience.

Now let’s look at the negatives. To be honest, I was taken by surprise when the game ended so suddenly. It costs only $2 on Steam, so it’s OK to be short.. and yet I thought the teleporting mechanic was quite novel and unique, along with the other environmental puzzle elements. There was so much room here to build upon and make many more rooms with much more complex and difficult ideas and combinations. But unfortunately just when things are starting to get interesting the game abruptly comes to an end. I have a hunch that this game was going to be much bigger but the dev decided to just tie up the loose ends and abandon it as a little cheap game.

Another strange thing is the shoot-em-up horizontal space shooter sections. There’s one at the start and the very end of the game. It’s just a really uninterested uninspired bullet hell type side-scroller thing where you avoid shots from the bad guy and hold down your button to slowly deplete his HP bar. So boring and completely out of place in this game, I have no idea why on earth those sections were included.

Ultimaltely, unfortunately, this review ended up being way longer than I intended. At certain points I liked this game, there are some occasional strokes of pure genius in level and puzzle design, along with music art and other elements. But it also seems a bit cobbled together a amateurish, especially with the abrupt end, the shooter sections and other strange dips in quality. Overall, I enjoyed the same and it was worth the money but I can’t fully recommend; if you’re looking for amazing ultra-cheap platformers, there are plenty (like Baezult 1 & 2) which are much more deserving of your attention.

Out There Somewhere is a platformer in which you solve puzzles using your "teleport gun". So kind of like a 2-D pixelated Portal. That's actually a very apt way of describing it: if you enjoyed Valve's Portal and Portal 2, you'll probably enjoy Out There Somewhere. Of course, Out There Somewhere doesn't have the comedy provided by GLaDOS and Wheatley, but the gameplay is similar.

However, because the teleport gun works slightly different than the portal gun, it does make the gameplay somewhat unique. For example, there are several types of beams that interact with the gun's shot in different ways. There are blocks of things like vents and glass that you cannot walk through but can shoot a teleport bullet through. The teleport bullets are also fairly slow meaning that you can jump just before it hits to give yourself momentum on the other side. The puzzles are all fairly simple, though sometimes challenging to get just right. Overall it felt very very good, like the devs thought a lot about each puzzle and aspect of gameplay.

The game starts (and ends) with a space shooter section, which is ok. I'm not very good at space shooters, even less so when I'm forced to use the ZXC and arrow keys (hands flipped from an arcade machine). I don't really know why they stuck that in a puzzle platformer besides the dev really wanting to make a space shooter section. The game gives you a gun which I liked and disliked: using it to shoot blocks out of the way is really cool but just using it to shoot the shit out of something to "solve the puzzle" seemed a little "meh" to me. And lastly, you have the ability to upgrade your ship (just for the final battle, I guess) by collecting things, but (a) I could not find any, (b) I wasn't even looking for them for the first half of the game because no one told me, and thus (c) I wasn't able to upgrade. At all. Not a huge deal, I just didn't engage in that part of the game. The game was fun, but not fun enough to backtrack to find an unknown number of things in order to get an unknown upgrade for the last scene of the game.

The end playtime for my main story was 83 minutes, which is certainly not that long but it was very enjoyable. It was very pleasing on the eyes, had a good soundtrack, and kept my attention without making the rage. The $5 price tag might seem a little steep for less an hour and a half of play and if you think so, there's a package on Steam called the "Developer Alliance Bundle" that includes Out There Somewhere as well as 3 other games for (on sale) 1.49 USD. In any case, I would recommend Out There Somewhere to anyone who likes platform puzzle games and I'm going to keep an eye on the developers and check out whatever other games they've made.