Okay, this is pretty good, and it's one of the few puzzle platformers I have played that truly made me think with its somewhat intrincate stage design.
Graphics are retro and minimalistic, but good looking, and the music is composed of a tiny handful of solid, enjoyable chiptunes that I could totally listen to all day... or at least for a few hours.
The gameplay, on the surface, is basically a standard puzzle platformer, with the gimmick of dying and ressurecting in order to move objects when alive and reach unaccessible places when dead. What keeps it all fresh, interesting and involving is its clever stage design that really makes the player think in order to get to the goal, always putting to good use the game's small, but solid array of different features. You die whenever you get crushed or touch spikes, and you ressurect when you touch that red liquid. There are also things such as the spoon switches that alternate the opening and closing of different colored gates that open ways, close ways, provide platforms and hold crates in place. A few more features I won't describe in here (to avoid turning this review into a technical report) can also be found throughout the levels, and they always serve a crucial purpose in every stage, without there ever being unnecessary "filler content" to distract the player from the solutions.
The main task of the game, to simply get to the door, is extremely easy in the first 19 levels, but the added challenge of picking up the grapefruit (whose purpose you are oblivious too until much later) is what really gets the player thinking during the early parts of the game. The stages that come after a certain condition is met, on the other hand, have reaching the door as their only challenge, and they are mostly way harder than the first 19. It all narrows down to deciding what crate must be in what position at what time, what spoon switch should be triggered in what situation, which liquid streams must be interrupted to keep the player from reviving in what circumstances, etcetera. All that thinking gets pretty hard and interesting while never being cruel or frustrating. Whenever I thought I was in the right track and saw myself having to do a bunch of aggravating trial and error, it always turned out I was trying the wrong solution all along, meaning that the right solutions never demanded copious amounts of "tee n e" like in many other puzzle games out there.
The game's story is hilarious, but pretty hooking at the same time. It starts out with the premise of an eternal life elixir that allows people to return to life if their lifeless ghosts come in contact with the elixir in question. The game works with the standard generic "evil scientist voice" trope (made popular by the likes of Portal), just like a billion other puzzle platformers before it, but I think the trope in this game works better than in most other browser platformers I've played so far, due to not taking itself seriously at all. The "DEAD END" ending creeped me out way more than it should, even though avoiding it was simply a matter of timing and speed, probably because I kept imagining myself living inside a sealed container of red liquid for the rest of my life. The story of the game takes a bizarre turn when it starts revealing what motivated the creation of that life elixir in the first place, making things get pretty deep, but hilarious at the same time. I'd rather not spoil it, though. The ending cutscenes were awesome, and I actually smiled quite a bit afterwards, I don't know why.
So, to sum it up: short, pleasant experience, offering some nice bits of challenge in spite of its simplicity, and a cool story. Oh yeah! The only problem I found in this game is that the jumping will sometimes randomly fail if I press it too close to a crate or a ledge, but maybe that's just me.
