![]() You begin managing simple systems such as thrusters and stabilisers, until eventually you're managing the temperature with operable shutters, working two different energy units together and figuring out which landing kit you'll want to deploy. It's a brilliantly tactile interface that blossoms in complexity over time. Functional to a degree, that is - the interface has borrowed the look of Windows 3.1, the systems glitching in and out of service as you come into grief in your adventures. It's here where the systems slowly blink into place in a functioning facsimile of an engineering panel. You control the ship with the left stick, directing a scanner with the right, but the real busy work happens on the touchscreen of the GamePad where your 'Heads-Down Display' resides. It's an unwieldy machine at first, nonchalantly weaving about the environments until more of its systems come into play, and when you've more control over its many features. The ship itself is a design with its own cute detail sporting the dynamic lines of an Austin Allegro with a fax machine bolted to it, there's a satisfying diesel huff, wheeze and chug when you fire up its petrol engines. ![]() The story unfurls through the environment, and through loading screens that feature pages torn out of a suspiciously cheery travel brochure, and from the manual to your diminutive spaceship. ![]() There's a scruffy joy to Affordable Space Adventures' aesthetic, one that leans on the rough-edged paranoia and scuffed-up fantasy of 70s sci-fi cinema such as Dark Star and Silent Running. There's no stone left unturned when it comes to Affordable Space Adventures' use of the GamePad - it even utilises the gyroscope. Once you land on the surface of the planet with a sizeable bump, things aren't quite as promised in the purple-mist caves and crags beyond your crash site. You're a traveller setting out on the titular affordable space adventure, your tour sold by a futuristic travel agency whose brochures and cheery proclamations seem to have come from a tatty Thomsons nestled somewhere between a Bejams and Rumbelows on an 80s high street. It's sold by some wonderful world building, a familiar sci-fi world of cheery advertisements undercut by a soft, latent menace. Affordable Space Adventures, a blend of exploration and puzzling, doesn't have the polished pleasure of Nintendo Land, and it's not quite as evocative as ZombiU, but it's a smart, well-engineered game that's worthy of their company - and an overdue reminder about what it is that makes the Wii U's proposition so special.ĭeveloper KnapNok has already proven an affinity with the Wii U's peculiarities with Spin the Bottle, a curious and charming party game built around the GamePad, and in teaming up with Knytt Underground creator Nifflas' Games it has created something more traditional, where you progress through linear levels by using the suite of tools gradually granted you to solve environmental puzzles. What a pleasant surprise it is, then, to have a new game joining those two launch titles in probing the Wii U's unique frontier. The Wii U's second screen has famously been under-utilised in the console's two years on the market, though there's another part of Nintendo's eccentric design that's been even more neglected the space between those two screens, where so much of the tensions of the brilliant ZombiU lie, and where all the fun and excitement of Nintendo Land can be found. Affordable Space Adventures is an inventive, charming environmental puzzler that makes full use of the Wii U's many quirks.
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