The GoD Unit, by Cat Floor Studio, is a first-person puzzle game in the vein of Portal. You control the mass of cubes (by manipulating their density with your Gauntlet of Density). Every chamber has an exit that must be unlocked by some activation (pressure plate, laser sensor, etc.) and it’s up to you to figure out how to satisfy that condition.
This is a game made by one person. It’s as indie as it gets, other than if he’d rolled his own engine or such. It’s an impressive result. While there are places that working with others would have made this a stronger game, I can’t really fault someone if they want to put the effort to do it all on their own.
The game did crash for me occasionally, six times in total. I lowered the graphics settings after the fifth time, and while I still did have one crash after that, it might have helped. Crashes are always frustrating, but particularly so when it happened toward the end of a puzzle with a lot of setup involved.
The writing was decent. It opens with a quasi-fat-joke, which made me a little skeptical, even if it is a game about manipulating the mass of objects. But the humor level other than that the writing is a decent replication of Portal-style cynical-puzzle-observer humor, and the backstory of the game seemed interesting to the extent I followed it.
Gameplay felt smooth. My biggest gripe there: bounce plates (catapults that fling whatever trips them). The activation area is too small. It should be made bigger. If I’m dumb enough to get that near to it, send me flying! If I didn’t like it, I’ll learn not to get too near. But at least a dozen times I had the opposite. I was trying trigger it, missed my mark, and had to reset a timer or other conditions to try again.
The game progression was good. It starts you out with the basics and builds through having more types of cubes and how much you can manipulate their mass. Later, you get a stabilized cube you can float on (you can lower the density so that they become lighter than air). You’ll get to play with cubes that can reroute lasers. And, eventually, black-hole-mass cubes (don’t worry, you can’t be spaghettified).
Hard mode wasn’t much more difficult than normal mode. The chambers have their differences (including some collectibles for achievements only being there in hard mode), but mostly it’s a few extra steps to complete. The biggest place was in chamber 40 where you have to kind of cube-hop (stand on a stable yellow cube, pick it up and put it down before you fall off) to get across one area. That’s the only place in the game the mechanic is required, and there’s no alternative. But it’s not difficult, and only a little bit tedious, and it is a difficulty progression from normal (where you use a pair of cubes as stepping stones to cross that area). Other than that, hard mode was a nice reposing of the normal mode problems with a small twist.
It took me 35 hours to get all the achievements. That was two full playthroughs (on normal and on hard), plus a lot of one-off attempts on levels for specific achievements or item-finding. It was a fun Portal-style puzzler, so if you like spatial logic and wearing a mass-manipulating glove, give this one a look (if you can take your eyes off the black holes).
