We’re always looking for new takes on the puzzler genre, and I think we’ve found one with Spacelings. An ingenious little game, Spacelings tasks you with retrieving the titular spacelings, little alien dudes in space suits.
You grab the aliens with your tractor beam, which you can bend around objects and such. But you can only bend your beam four times, and you can’t cross your beam.
So the goal of each level is to bend your beam around walls in order to get the spacelings within a limited time. But there’s a wild card in the middle of the fray: bombs. It gets really interesting after the game introduces bombs. See, the bombs, and your spacelings, tend to not stay in place, so you must flicker your tractor beam to get your spacelings moving while avoiding sucking the bombs into your ship and destroying it. The game escalates from there.
And so it becomes a game of both timing and puzzles, and that’s what sets Spacelings apart: It will test your brain and your coordination. It’s a combination that few games do well, but Spacelings gets it just about right.
I could recommend Spacelings for that reason alone, but I’ve got a better one. Spacelings is unique in a world where everybody copies each other, and that counts for something.
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