Little Space Duo

There's nothing hugely innovative about Little Space Duo, but it is a nicely polished little platform puzzler with a fairly intricate puzzle and level design, reminiscent in some ways of Mr. Robot.

I suspect there's a little bit of a mismatch between gameplay and intended audience: the puzzles are non-trivial, yet the protagonist and general approach seem geared toward the casual game audience, which tends to prefer games you can win by banging your head against the keyboard, that is, which are trivially easy. You play a floating robot and a little girl trying to make their way through a multilevel spaceship, and enemies can only be avoided, never defeated. In other words, the nature of the protagonist and the lack of violence seems geared toward the casual audience.

The girl and 'bot have different capabilities: only the girl can operate lifts and turn off the purple "energy controls" (all of which must be disabled each level), but the robot can fly up shafts and throw narrow accessways, which the girl cannot. Thus, as in many games of this sort, you often switch between the two characters and use their combined abilities to solve the level.

Animations are smooth, the music is pleasant (albeit a bit tedious after a time), and it feels like the developers took care with their work; it's an indie, not an amateur, effort. It's also a typical 60 minute-limited demo -- I would have preferred some set number of levels in the demo rather than a time limit, as its frustrating to run up against the limit in mid-level. But the full game is $10 (or 7 euros or 6 quid), which is a reasonable price should you like the game style.