Review: Blackhole
Game Reviews
Blackhole
FiolaSoft Studio
Reviewed on: PC
Also on: Mac, Linux
Street: 02.27
Whenever I start getting a big head about how good I am at video games, a simple 2D platformer like Blackhole will come out and completely humiliate me. It definitely hearkens back to the glory days of platform games—the days in which throwing a controller against the wall happened much more frequently. The game’s premise follows an interstellar coffee guy and his quest to find his stranded crew and rebuild their crashed spaceship. To do this, our hero teams up with the ship’s AI in order to explore a planet with some pretty flexible rules regarding its gravity. The purpose of this exploration is to find selfburn, a substance that unlocks new levels as well as repairs sections of the hero’s crashed ship. Within each level, the player can manipulate the planet’s gravity in order to gather as much selfburn as possible. Messing around with gravity ends up creating quite a few mind-bending puzzles to solve, and the game doesn’t hold your hand through the process. When the environment becomes increasingly hostile—slippery ice, untouchable lava, etc.—be ready to have all of those forgotten platformer traumas come rushing to the surface. –Alex Springer