Terry Cavanagh is back to break your brain again, albeit in the nicest possible way. Rather than tough as nails 2D platforming, like the fabulous VVVVVV, At A Distance is an asymmetric two player first person puzzler, with platforming elements, and it’s a little bit confusing.

At A Distance is a game of two sides, where one player is a small person inside a set of puzzle cubes, and the other is a big person, who gets to arrange the puzzle cubes for the small player. Hidden inside certain puzzle cubes are keys, which the small player has to collect, which in turn lets the big player access new areas, and find new puzzle cubes. The workload when it comes to puzzle solving is fairly even shared between both players, and without good communication neither player would be able to work out what’s going on, never mind find solutions.

Around half of the game is what you do on screen, and the other half is communication with your partner. Once both players have got to grips with the basics, the level of language required to effectively work together is actually fairly simple: It’s mostly going to be sharing information like colours, directions and descriptions of puzzle cubes.

Rather than using standard polygons and textures, At A Distance has a pointillism-esque array of rasterised pixels. It really stands out visually: I don’t think you could mistake this for any other game. All the components of the levels are relatively rudimentary and blocky, but Terry’s knack for efficient and economic level design is back in full force, as he manages to conjure several really impactful areas, just with simple constituent parts. There’s a few hints to perhaps a bit of storytelling, rather than just the mostly contextless puzzle solving the game feels like for the majority of the time, but there wasn’t anything concrete I could decern from my playtime.

I’d love to go into more detail about some of the clever tricks waiting for you in At A Distance, but half of the joy is in discovering them yourselves. Towards the end of the section I played, there’s a nice little subversion of the traditional first person jumping puzzle. Clever stuff.

I’ll be speaking to Terry later on during the Expo to find out more.

[Distractionware]

Trailer