Off-Planet Dreams gives you everything you need to be successful if you really want to be successful. Help is available (almost) anytime with just a few button presses. This makes the game uniquely accessible, even though it’s an “invisible puzzle platformer” designed to keep you tripping over and over again until you’ve learned enough from your mistakes to move on. I feel it. Depending on how you approach it, Off-Planet Dreams can be either a nightmare loop of trial and error or a relatively light-hearted platforming adventure. Or something in between. I died 274 times in my first playthrough, which shows you how difficult it is.
Off-Planet Dreams shows you a grid (playing as the Blob) and some floating doors and basically says, “Okay, now go ahead and find your way out.” There are platforms that form the path to each door, but not all platforms are visible. This is where the game’s “set your own difficulty” ethos comes into play. Jump into the abyss each time, hoping to land on the platform, and remember each time you fail so you know what not to do next time. If you die, you can choose one of three available tools for guidance. Peek gives you a quick glance at nearby platforms, Paint highlights platforms you step on, and View shows all platforms in the room.
Being the stubborn person that I am, I decided to try as much as I could without anyone’s help. But before I got that far, I realized I was stuck at levels 2-5 and was humbled. This level has multiple sublevels and going through the wrong door will send you back to the beginning over and over again. Here, in the end I turned on “Display” just to give my brain some space to figure out what the puzzle was without having to worry about remembering the platform I enabled it. (When I finally figured it out, it wasn’t that complicated. Sigh). From then on, I vacillated between going for nothing and using the “paint” option as a little treat.
The game throws me a curveball about halfway through when it introduces a new mechanic that requires cranking, but once I got past the initial frustration of not knowing what was going on, I thought this was really clever. And what’s more, Off-Planet Dreams has gone through a change in style, turning into something completely different from what it started out as. When the developers write in the description that Off-Planet Dreams is “more than a grid of dots,” they’re not kidding. It was a lot of fun. Currently available from the Playdate catalog for $6.
