Game #58/225

Elechead is a fun game that didn’t live up to its reputation for me. It seems like every review online from fan and critic alike has overwhelmingly positive praise for Elechead. It’s a safe game — simple puzzle platformer with retro graphics and music, clearly yet somehow vaguely inspired by Mega Man solid mechanics and well thought out puzzles. It’s very short, only an hour or two long if you’re quick to solve the puzzles, and you probably will be because they’re all fairly easy. It’s not that it wasn’t worth the $6 I spent on it. It’s definitely a decent Limbo-lite (if Limbo wasn’t lite enough as is) with some well strong yet easy puzzles, but the entire package just didn’t have enough meat on its bones to really impress me. It does have about 25 collectibles and a secret ending, many of which I didn’t (care to) find, but with only 6 short “worlds” in which mostly the same music, color pallettes, and stage designs are used (all very blue and blocky), it leans a little too comfortably into the minimalism schtick. You’ll find the head throwing and purposefully slow and floaty Elechead fun and unique to control, but he doesn’t gain any new powers, doesn’t face more than a small handful of new types of hazards or challenges, and doesn’t really seem to have any major mind bending obstacles. I’m thinking of N++, which has both difficult puzzles and a high skill requirement, or Cocoon (played recently), that challenges the player to think in ways that you’ve never seen in other games. I think that there’s a higher standard in place for puzzle platformers and there’s nothing remarkable about Elechead that Limbo didn’t already do 11 years earlier.

But yes, I am still charmed by the graphics and style.