Review: REDDER

REDDER. I freaking loved this game. It’s so simple, but the right balance of easy and difficult!

Making a game that doesn’t require a lot of information to play is always tricky, and Gamejam games that don’t have a tutorial or anything always win an extra award. Redder just relies purely on using ←↨→ and spacebar (although the up arrow also works as jump). Pretty easy- you don’t even need to know the convention of using WASD!

And talk about the right amount of story… that (extremely) brief intro communicates the context of the game exactly. Exciting diamonds = fuel, the spaceship runs out and you, little astronaut, need to go look for more.

It starts off relatively easy, and while “hard” and “difficult” aren’t exactly the right words to use here (for me, they imply “impossible” and “I keep dying”), it becomes increasingly tricky to get to the diamonds, often requiring more and more foresight, skill, and spatial orientation (the map helps).

I’m a sucker for pixel art, and I think it really works well for REDDER. Plus, I don’t know if my computer was somehow glitching (I don’t think so, but I’m open to it), but after you’ve been playing for a while, getting closer to your goal, some trippy stuff starts happening. It’s not enough to distract you, and it breaks up the visual monotony of walking through the same chambers again and again purely because you missed the jump and fell to the ground three chambers below.

I also really enjoyed the music. I would like to say more about this, but all you need to know is that it suits the visual style as well as the theme, and doesn’t get annoying after playing for hours (at least, I didn’t get bored of it. I wouldn’t mind playing it now…)

I played it at AdultSwim Games, but you can find it on its native home at Newgrounds.