GLO - Difficult Indie Platformer Reviews

Glo is a simple yet challenging platforming game built a fairly unique mechanic: each and every level is shrouded in almost complete darkness. The only sources of light are your projectiles, your character, and the level exit. This lack of visual information lends itself to an initially slow-paced exploration of each level, looking for traps, enemies, and pitfalls. Death (and you [i]will[/i] die) is a minor inconvenience, instantaneously resetting you to the beginning of the level you are on. Given that the levels themselves are fairly small, the layout is soon memorized and you will find yourself zipping toward the exit with greater and greater speed and continuously making progress. The piecemeal story is revealed through writing on the wall and hidden memory fragments which were interesting enough to keep me moving forward. [b]Pros:[/b] [list] [*]Challenging gameplay [*]Effective visual aesthetic [*]Interesting level design [*]Fair death mechanic [/list] [b]Cons:[/b] [list] [*]Controls are quite slippery (at least with keyboard and mouse) [*]Some of the 100 levels are repeated with very little modification [/list] Glo is a rewarding little indie game that I recommend to all platformer fans.

I have mixed feelings about Glo after completing the game. First the things I liked about Glo. Glo is a hardcore platformer with a nice twist – the whole world is pitch dark with only your avatar and the end goal glowing faintly. You can shoot some glowing projectiles to explore your surroundings a bit. The darkness that doesn’t allow you to see very far ahead, the nasty writings on the wall, the disturbing sounds, the flying enemies that try to get you, the one-hit-instant-death mechanic, and the lack of save points, these all add up to a tense atmosphere. Fortunately, you respawn extremely quickly. Your avatar moves pretty well, with the exception of how slippery it sometimes is, especially when you land on the red sliding-disk-enemies. The level design is mostly good, but sometimes overly sadistic, especially when the hardest part of a level is put at the end (remember, no save points - die and you go back to the start of the level). Because of the darkness, players need to rely heavily on trial and error and memorization to make it to the end. However, Glo is certainly no puzzle game, without platforming skill you won’t get very far. Some of the jumps and tricks you need to perform in certain levels at first seem totally impossible to pull off, but obviously all of them are possible, and when you finally master them this feels very rewarding. Even though the basic gameplay mechanisms are well implemented, the game really suffers from a couple of (in my honest opinion) mistaken design decisions. There are 100 levels and 4 bosses. After every 25 levels you get a boss fight. The boss fights are totally different from the level design of the rest of the game and feel a bit out of place - in the boss fights the player needs to rely completely on memorization, and much less on skill. My major complaint is about the weird and erratic difficulty curve. In each set of 25 levels a new game mechanic is introduced. The levels in each set of 25 progressively get more complicated and challenging. However, the final levels of the first set of 25 levels are just as hard as the final levels of each of the following 3 sets of 25 levels - there is not a gradual difficulty curve in this game, but instead the difficulty curve resembles a saw blade. This means that you will encounter some of most difficult levels already early in the game. If you can make it past the first boss, you basically have proven you can make it until the very end of the game – just look at the proportion of players that has beaten boss number 1 (14.7%), 2 (9.8%), 3 (8.8%) or all 4 (8.8%) bosses – nearly everyone that beat boss 2 has completed the game! The huge difficulty spikes early on in the game apparently lock out many players from experiencing a large part of the game because there is no way you can skip a level. I understand that Glo wants to be a hardcore platformer, but I think the game has done itself a disservice by preventing a very large part of the people who bought the game from progressing very far into the game, even when many of the early levels in each set of 25 levels are pretty easy. Although your avatar generally controls very well, there are a few annoying exceptions. In level 72 for instance, you have to traverse a simple little maze dropping through 1-block wide holes in the floor, but doing this is actually very difficult because your character needs to be lined out exactly above the hole to be able to fall through. Unfortunately you can't position yourself that precisely and I got unfairly killed by moving blocks because of this issue very often in this level. In all, I did have a good time playing Glo, but this game truly is not suitable for casual players: if you did not get 106% in Super Meat Boy, Glo might not be for you. Glo is mostly like the Cotton Alley dark world levels from SMB.