Scrap Garden, a pretty simple and beautiful platformer about a lonely robot

Here's one from my inbox, Scrap Garden [Steam, Official Site], a platformer about a lonely robot who appears to be the last remaining bot after some kind of event left the world in a post-apocalyptic state.


I was actually sent this a long time ago, but due to the constant influx of news, some games, sadly, get buried.

You control Canny, a very lonely robot. He was due for an upgrade, but during the process everyone seemed to stop moving. Something happened to all your friends, they're all rusted and old. Plants and trees have grown everywhere and just what the hell happened here?

It's a fully 3D platformer inspired by games like Donkey Kong, Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot. It certainly has its own flavour and, while it's interesting, it sadly in no way holds a candle to them. It's not bad, but the general gameplay isn't massively exciting. It's more of a relaxing exploration as you collect some gems and find out what happened.

The majority of the game is going from various locations, collecting gems to enable you to power something up, or finding a key to unlock something. The game worlds aren't very big, so there's not a massive amount of exploration to do either.

The different locations are great. From cities, to deserts, to exploring dark buildings full of spiders. It has a reasonably nice variety on offer. The puzzles are simple, easy to solve and for once, I didn't have any issue at all. Didn't get stuck even once.

The enemies are all simplistic, with basic movements that activate when you go near them. There's practically no challenge to it. Still, even without the challenge it's absolutely charming. It looks damn good visually, the little robot is likeable and sweet and I can't help but like the game. I feel a certain amount of empathy for my little robot friend, left almost alone (since you do come across a few robots who survived) as it tries to fix the mess.

While most normal enemies are overly simple, there are boss battles too which do nicely mix up the gameplay on offer here. The problem is that the boss battles aren't very good.

The first boss battle after the cave section was weird. I eventually figured out you had to hit in the head with broken up rocks from when it tries to body slam you. It was stupidly hard to do initially, since your movement speed is so damn slow. It was not a good battle and clearly needed a little more thought put into it mechanically. On top of that, if you got hit by it, your carried rock is broken up requiring you to move slowly to pick up another and probably miss your chance to hit it. It took forever, it was not fun. It was a sour experience in an otherwise relaxing platformer. The second boss battle also had slight issues, given the camera angle it was easy to fall off the platform when trying to pick up rocks. Each boss battle felt like it needed some minor adjustments to help them flow better.

It worked beautifully with the Steam Controller with no config adjustments needed, great stuff! It looks good, performance is good and I didn't have a single issue with it in terms of bugs or performance.

If the developer's aim was to create a reasonably charming platformer for a younger generation, they might have an audience here. The narrator sounds like he's reading you a story-book, with further cements my thoughts about it being primarily aimed at a younger audience. It doesn't take long to progress and find out what happened, so for those with a short attention span it's pretty good. There's just not enough for an adult like myself to get fully into it. If you have kids, it might be fun for them, but certainly not for any adult expecting a really rewarding experience. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.