Space Sprouts Steam Charts & Stats

This is E3.

This is what we called an indie gem. Unique, Creative, Fun, Charming Art, Weird (in a good way), and with a good price.

I like this game. There is a lot going on here. It's a platforming puzzle game with object puzzles, code puzzles, gravity puzzles and laser reflecting puzzles and maybe more that I haven't seen yet. There is also a time loop element but I can't say much about it because I am terrible at this kind of game. It's cool on sale and would also be good at full price IMHO. And I have a cat named Sprouts.

I loved this game so much!! Space Sprouts is a time loop puzzle adventure where you explore a colorful and rather messy spaceship. There is a framing narrative where you are much older and explaining to your grandkid exactly how it went when you traveled on a spaceship for the first time (so the time loop consists of retellings of your eventful flight). Technically, you are supposed to sit still and do nothing during the flight, but of course that's not what you're going to do, right?! There are 100 different memories to gather, each one is of things that you've done on the spaceship. A lot of these are weird and chaotic in a fun sense - I really enjoyed unlocking them -, and the game gives you ideas about what they could possibly be. Each memory also lengthens the amount of time available in the loop by a little. There is no combat and the entire game is very cozy. It has a really striking ligne claire aesthetic (I saw an interview where the devs specifically mentioned Moebius being an inspiration) and it is also very, for the lack of a better expression, nonbinary-coded. I dunno, plants and space and crystals and colorful stuff? As a nonbinary person I found this relatable and awesome. By the way, the protagonist Oda doesn't seem to have any gender pronouns in-game (your grandkid just addresses you as "you"), but the Steam page uses they/them pronouns for them and that was also my first guess. I gathered 96 memories without looking things up, and then I got quite stuck, so I looked up the remaining ones for 100%. Overall the game took me around 12 hours. Interestingly I got the ending at 95 memories, I don't know if that's where it triggers or if I did something specific. The game is all in 2D, but the objects and your body have simulated physics, so you can get up to a lot of unexpected things - and I'd say many of the memories can probably be unlocked in multiple ways. You can't die per se (technically, I guess!), but you can end up in really rather dire situations, the spaceship is not particularly safe. I've seen people repeatedly raise the question whether this game was a metroidbrainia - in fact I found out about it in the metroidbrainia subreddit. I'd absolutely say yes. I'll try to explain this without spoilers. There are a lot of knowledge-based unlocks, both the less exciting type where you get a code that you have to enter (like the melodies in Toki Tori 2+), and also the ones that are more structural, like figuring out how certain objects interact or how you can do something without having to go to a specific place. Space Sprouts also has the aspect where once you figured out something, it can change the way you interact with the entire environment. And it also has the classic metroidvania feature of running around on a large interconnected 2D map where you can gradually reach new areas. It's very interesting to me that the game came out this year, like Blue Prince, and both are puzzle adventures with roguelike elements, but have very different takes on this novel combination and seem to have been developed entirely independently. Are we at the beginnings of a roguelike puzzle adventure boom? (Can we blame this on Outer Wilds?) I don't know. This is a much more condensed experience than Blue Prince, in 10-15 hours you really can see everything - and I enjoyed myself all the while. I only had some smaller qualms. First of all, the controls are probably quite intuitive on mouse + keyboard, but they aren't really on a controller. I played with the Steam Deck docked to the TV and with a PS4 controller, which has a small touchscreen, and I ended up using the touchscreen a lot. It took me a while to get used to it, but it was absolutely worth it, because the game was so much fun. The Steam page says controller support is still coming, alongside an update with bonus content. My other qualm was that the ending was quite brief, I would've liked something a bit longer - though this is definitely one of those games where the journey itself makes it worth it. I loved this game to bits and am honestly shocked it has under 50 reviews, so I'll clearly have to run around and tell people about it. __ Source of the game: Bought with my own money