Games are good these days, aren’t they? What a state of affairs. Sadly, that means you might be a little overwhelmed if I said that ElecHead is an extremely smart platform puzzler. Great game these days! You probably have hundreds of very smart platform puzzle games to choose from. Many, like ElecHead, will use simple ideas explored in a series of clever ways. Many, like ElecHead, will come from teams of one or two people who have worked brilliantly and hard on projects they are passionate about.So what makes ElecHead true special? I think so, but I can’t put it into words yet. Let’s talk about it and see what happens.
In ElecHead, you play as a tiny robot with an electric charge on its head. Stand on a metal platform and the platform will share your costs. This means that visually it lights up a certain color, and so does everything else related to it – nice and clear, without misreading the situation. In mechanical terms, this means that anything connected to that platform that needs power goes to work: the platform starts to move, the phantom blocks suddenly come back to life, and the machine starts to do the machine’s thing. It will run as long as you are connected to the platform.
This means that if you jump, say, as long as you’re in the air without making contact with the platform, what you’re driving will stop working. So those ghost blocks that pop up will disappear. Those moving platforms may fall back to their original positions. Deadly Fields you trigger will no longer be lethal. Good news and bad news, really: Possibilities.
Browse through some puzzles based on this idea alone, which will keep you busy in the first few minutes of ElecHead. You move between rooms, all picked out in chunky 2D pixel art, each with a clever puzzle for you to solve. How to overcome this obstacle? How do you get through these energy beams when you need to stand on the platform that triggers them? How to bring this promising platform from the other side of the room (you can’t use it) to the other side of the room, it really helps?
Even here, in these first moments, a lot of what makes ElecHead so satisfying is already at work. You could call it the Sherlock Holmes principle. You know how everything works because the electrical rules of the game are so simple. You know what you can do, and you know what you can’t do. When faced with a task, exclude everything you can’t do, and the rest must include solutions. ElecHead is clever, but also compact. It guides you and prompts you to be the smartest.
“This is where the game becomes great: all practical frugality, simple solutions you have to work on, and then: ta-da!”
But the great thing is that things won’t be this simple for long. Soon, you find that you can remove your head and throw it away. Your head is the part you are responsible for. So you can separate your body from the charge, which opens up a whole new range of possibilities – especially since the range where you can swing your head is limited and clearly marked. (By the way, can’t reconnect with your head for ten seconds, and then you’ll have a blast.) Again, you have complete information, but new possibilities. The game begins to distort its elements in subtle but very understandable ways.
I think this is where the game becomes great: practical frugality, simple solutions you have to work on, and then: ta-da! That smug little buzz, you came up with it yourself.
As it turns out, everything can be part of a puzzle. So: if you get stuck, the checkpoint resets the puzzle – but maybe resetting the puzzle at a specific point by triggering a checkpoint will be the trick to all things? Then there are the rooms, which connect in a pleasing way and give the individual puzzles a sense of context and continuity. Maybe, like a good Zelda dungeon, ElecHead will play puzzles that involve multiple rooms? Maybe you need to consider what’s off the current screen? Maybe the circuit you triggered is more complex than you thought?
That’s what I suspect ElecHead is a proper keeper for me – connecting rooms in a fun way that encourages you to think every now and then how well-defined game rules can work in multiple connected spaces at once – it transforms from a puzzle game For a puzzler that is also a place, a fun mechanic with its own secrets, its own subtle hints to find a deeper story.Well, ElecHead is very smart, but it’s also always better than only clever. This is awesome, basically.
