Hey do you remember 140?? That was a fun game! Back in the Humble Monthly October 2016 bundle Carlsen Games had their second title show up as one of the mystery titles. I was eager to play it, then I had a sad face when I found it had no default Keyboard and mouse support.

It didn't take too long for the complaints to start. And eventually KB+M was added. It took me a while to get to it, but an even shorter period before I uninstalled it.

THOTH is basically a top-down avoidance shooter, or twin-stick shooter if you prefer. You are the white sphere, you move slower when shooting, you need to shoot enemy shapes.

As such there's no plot, or story, or reason to any of this. It's just a basic puzzle game and thankfully does not try to do any more than that.

Made up of 64 arenas who's number counts as the background graphic, you need to make your way from 64 to zero.

Though I didn't like this one, I did appreciate some of the things it tried to do.

Enemy shapes are not exactly flat polygons, but 3D shapes projected onto a flat plane. That square moving towards you? Soon it appears as a cube, changing the outline dimensions of its attack surface.

There's no height map, so this makes grasping it a little more difficult at first.

And the progression of enemy and environment types is also on a slow enough slope. You are soon introduced to background hazards. Solid blocks then tiny spheres. Levels deeper and these spheres begin to move by rotating around the map, meaning you have to keep track of them as well as the cubes.

Soon after, they act as staticly placed switch gates. Killing one enemy will toggle them on and off. The next set turns one off and one on. Then this is combined with them also moving.

The real problem I have is not so much the direct difficulty. Most of the deaths I had were from stupid mistakes on my part.

The problem I have is that it is just not fun. And that the reward for progressing feels like it has no worth to it. While the concepts introduced are nice, there's just not a lot of interesting things to see overall in the game.

The punishment for failing also feels overly harsh, kicking you back to the next arena colour section. While this may only be up to 4 levels, and they don't take long to progress through, it feels like such a slog and waste of time to get back to where you last died with the aim of doing better.

I don't really learn anything from this. There's no experience learnt from replaying previous levels and just being able to do them a fraction of a second faster to get to the deepest you last got to.

Other genres manage to make dying fun and feel like you achieve something. I'm not sure what I'm after here. Lives maybe? Give me another shot at the same level before kicking me back? Give me a something to avoid being cornered, even if it is my own fault? Anything but punishing the player without them learning something to help them.

I honestly can't recommend this one. Go play their previous title 140 and see that they can do good things.

And if you are after top down | twin-stick shooters, there's plenty of great titles out there you could be playing instead of this one.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (October 2016)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 17 February 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7/8
Processor: 2.0 GHz or faster
Memory: 2 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 300 MB available space