The game that we know today as pompom is an enlarged version of another, developed for a game jam organized by Game Makers Toolkit and called Walkie Tori. The idea is the same: instead of controlling the protagonist (here a hamster named Pompom and embarks on a risky mission to save his human friend, kidnapped by a Gatuno group of spatial pirates), you are modifying the level for, first, avoid falling into vacuum and getting it from healthy and except for the goal; and, second, to get it pick up as many coins and carrots as possible.
It is an eccentric design and in which there is a lot of audacity that moved some of the most memorable games of 16 bits, of that super nintendo to which Willem Rosenthal, the creator of Pompom, has so much love. The reference is obvious (at times, the winks to Super Mario World almost seem excessive) but the execution is much more remarkable. Without you can do anything to avoid it, Pompom advances through the levels with a great decision and without worrying about the good of it; It is your task to place platforms, springs and other pieces on your trajectory, to prevent it from falling into the abysses or hurting the obstacles increasingly numerous with which it is crossing. This impetus lemmingesco may sound overwhelming but the game is responsible for giving you enough resources to make Pompom reach your destination, as the possibility of stopping the time for a few moments to choose where you are going to put the next platform or a welcome bubble that gives you A second chance to the rodent when it falls into vacuum.
It is not an excessively difficult game, but of course it is not easy; The brought from choosing pieces and placing them at the right place is considerable, and when the levels begin to gain complexity the weight of the game is considerably greater than that of that Super Mario World in which it is fixed. But it is shown to keep attention, to a large extent thanks to the intelligent way with which different types of challenges are interspersed: the basic platforms and springs are soon combined with balloons or scissors that have much more specific uses and allow Form at very different levels, both for the type of challenge they propose and by the address in which they are mounted. Little by little you stop using the pieces in the order in which you receive them and choose which you want to place more consciously, by necessity or by pure taste, to test the limits of the decided but suicidal jump of Pompom.
What has seemed most intelligent, however, is the brilliant role of the secondary goals, those who go beyond getting that the hamster reaches the goal. Getting all the coins and picking up the carrot of each level is more complicated, and that is where you can see Pompom the puzzle game mimbres. A section that would otherwise be more or less simple has its intrinsome when the game forces you to make it a certain way to achieve some coins that are higher or lower than normal; the carrots can be very in sight (after all, you can not _Explore the levels, but you see what is in the trajectory of pompom, which is basically everything), but getting them forces you to rethink your strategies and even Use not so obvious techniques, even in the first levels. In this way, the game manages to integrate more advanced challenges or complex variants from which you have been seeing at the levels; It stimulates you curiosity at all times, organically, encouraging you to try creative solutions without you feeling that you are missing something if you do not get to take them out or if you leave something along the way.
It has a lightness that certainly takes a bit of the great new classics of its gender, but I think it compensates you by doing everything possible to waste originality and craftsmanship. It is a virtue that you usually have the games born in game jams, actually, a category that pompom: The Great Space Rescue defends with great intelligence and with that touch of naivety that looks, indeed, in many super games Nintendo, when the masters were still writing the libers that today almost all follow with a counterproductive attention.
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