R

By: Derek Yu

On: July 18th, 2007

When I first booted up R, it looked like a mediocre Knytt wannabe, but there’s a lot more there than meets the eye. Sorry to be mysterious, but you have to experience it for yourself. It may take a bit of trying (especially with the slightly too-slippery controls), but once you get into it, it’s a trip.

The game’s missing a few levels in-between (it’s v0.9 and will be forever), but it’s playable from beginning to end. Your accomplishments are automatically saved if you quit the game.

By the way, this is from the guy who made Soldat.

Posted in Freeware, Platformers, Windows | Tags: MichalMarcinkowski

BeamSplashX

And for a second I thought it would be a ripoff of N! I like the style of the graphics.

I never beat Knytt (or Within a Deep Forest) and have now lost all motivation to do so since I stopped a while ago. Eh, fun while they lasted.
Xander

Rats, I wasted the entire day playing Bomberman and then this shows up just as I’m about to go out. Looks pretty nice though, I’ll have to play around on it soon.
Jared

For people who are just playing it, wait until you get to the prison break level; it’s quite epic.
Yan

Is it possible to guess the riddler’s number correctly?
Ryan A

I am horrible at this…How do you make the first jump?
Eudaimon

I wonder if I’m correct in thinking that this game is an argument against the “games as art” crowd? If so, it’s probably the most artistic of such arguments so far. Kind of like dadaism for games.
Eponymouse

I kind of liked the post “The End” levels, could go further with that idea, but not much further.
makeshifter

when i open it up my screen goes black like a screen saver. i have a program to fix this but it doesn’t work now i don’t get it. if i can fix it ill tell you my comments
Melly

I really don’t like the control scheme in this game. It overcomplicates things that should be simple. Say, if you hold the umbrella button in midair you open the umbrella, but you have to let it go in order to glide forward or backwards. All I can ask is “Why?”. Why not just let holding the button down make you float and letting it go make you fall again, allowing you to move in midair with the button pressed? It’s half the ammount of presses with the very same effect, no control lost over the character. The wall-jumping and grabing is iffy as well, and having a set height for all jumps just doesn’t help in navigating the environment, which wouldn’t be simple to begin with.

It’s almost like the crazy controls are another challenge to be overcome, which just makes dying and going back to the beginning of the level frustrating. Can’t really recommend it.
http://www.planetfreeplay.com Mosh

Yeah managed to play this back when it was released unfinished. Mores the pity that it wasn’t because it was really decent.
http://www.distractionware.com Echo

I’m totally stuck in the first swamp room – I can’t get the door open… Any hints?
Derek

Hint: the little guys want to go home…
g

Hey, there’s source code included, so it seems I ported it to linux or something. Sent the author the port, so with some luck it should be up there soonish.
http://www.distractionware.com Echo

Derek: Cheers, that did it :D

Is it just me, or is this game bloody hard?
Ryan A

Ohhhh, tap control rather than holding it down. *Doh*.

To be honest, it’s not bad, just highly frustrating. I would have expected something more awesome knowing that it was coded by the guy who made soldat :(.

Pretty awesome of him to release the source though! I love games that do that.
Pwny

When I download this and extract it, this game seems to be an adventure game I played a while ago called reactor 09…I don’t think that it is the right game…
Bonekhan

Perhaps one of Nifflas’ inspirations?
Stwelin

Read the entire thing thinking “ah, well, another seemingly boring platformer” until the end. Should have said it was made by Michal in the first place. :P
wourme

I was initially put off by the strong language in the introduction and some of the frustrating early segments, but this game is really something after you make some progress.
Alan

How long does it take for it to become worthwhile? I’m stuck on map 8 (The swamp one with the rolling ball pushing the block) and nothing about the game, particularly not the tedious, stupid dialogue, has caused me any modicum of entertainment.
!CE-9

this is an interesting piece of– no, not shit, it’s a neat little game. nothing about it is _all_that_ bad — except for the lack of the story and the cave wall graphics. to boot, it’s definitely more action packed than Knytt. it has interesting little effects too (like the parallax scroll or the colorfade background) – which makes the fact the source code is enclosed quite appealing to the gamedev wannabe like me.

I did enjoy bits of the music, the chase levels, and some of the blathering found on the computer terminals in the last episode (oh yeah, there’s a nasty bug with one of them though).

Alan: push the block near the first verge, wait until the ball bounces on the block, then push the block fast all the way to small pit in front of the Strangler below the starting point (there’s another Strangler next to the Wisp-generator (hut), you gonna jump over that).
!CE-9

ah, finished now… you gotta love this. after the end (which is simple and effective like tesco value vodka) the lack of story and the ramblings of the characters will make a little more sense. but that’s not the point.

meta-gaming, boy! think about it, see what’s beyond the game after you’ve seen everything. when does it exactly ends?

great job (and I think, just about enough. more lenght would just have added quantity to it, not quality). now gimme Braid, quick.
Stwelin

Controls are very slippery, wall jumping doesn’t make sense to me, after playing for a while i lost interest.
Alan

Okay, I’m up to stage 18 now, and the game has yet to be fun or non-frustrating for a single second. At this point I don’t really care whether or not there’s some amazing something at the end – the controls are too slippery and unintuitive, the game mechanics are too frustrating, the cutscenes are actively painful to sit through, and I don’t have the patience for it anymore.
Highlandian Nightmare

I would like to point out that this game is older than Knytt, thus it can’t be a ‘Knytt wannabe’.