Off-Planet Dreams gives you everything you need to succeed, if you really want that. Help is just a few button-presses away at (almost) all times. Because of that, it feels uniquely accessible for what it is — an “invisible puzzle platformer” designed to trip you up over and over again until you’ve learned enough from your mistakes to move forward. Depending on how you approach it, Off-Planet Dreams is either a trial-and-error nightmare loop or a relatively easygoing platform adventure. Or something between the two. I died 274 times in my first playthrough, if that’s any indication of how challenging it can be.
Off-Planet Dreams presents you (playing as a blob) with a grid and some floating doors, and says, essentially, ‘okay, now find your way out.’ There are platforms that form a path to each door, but all the platforms are invisible. This is where the game’s “difficulty is what you make of it” ethos comes in. You can commit to jumping into the abyss every time and hoping to land on a platform, memorizing each misstep so you know what not to do the next time around if you die, or you can choose one of the three available tools for some guidance. “Peek” will give you a quick glimpse of any platforms nearby, “Paint” will highlight any platform you’ve stepped on, and “Show” will reveal all of the platforms in that room.
Being stubborn, I was determined to get as far as I could without any help. But, I was humbled not too far in when I found myself trapped in Level 2-5 — a level with multiple sublevels that’ll repeatedly throw you back to its start if you go through the wrong doors. Here, I eventually caved and enabled “Show” just to give my brain some space to work out what the puzzle was without having to worry about remembering platforms. (When I finally figured it out, it wasn’t even that complicated. Sigh). After that point, I bounced between going unaided and using the “Paint” option as a little treat.
The game throws a curveball at you about halfway through when it introduces a new mechanic that requires the crank, which I thought was really clever once I got over the initial frustration of not knowing what the hell was going on. And further on, Off-Planet Dreams undergoes a stylistic shift that transforms it into something else entirely than what it was at the beginning. The developers wrote in the description that Off-Planet Dreams is “more than a grid of dots,” and they weren’t kidding. I had a lot of fun with it. You can get it now on the Playdate Catalog for $6.
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