Cubic Pie's "Yury" is a game that taught me space suit physics get wonky with a Russian inside and made me hate platformers once more.

So. Here we go.

You are in a space ship, yadda yadda, something happens causing you to make an emergency landing on a planet. Temperature Normal, Atmosphere Unbreathable.

What do you do? Escape from the ship and run to the right. Yes there's nothing there. Keep running. That's it right some more. No. Keep goi- Don't go back left. That's it, run to the right... Surprise! The ground collapsed and now you need to head downwards.

To make it worse, controls are the arrow keys with 'Z' to jump and 'R' to respawn/restart. The Unity game setup window does have input controls but they were not recognised for me. I know this game wants to be retro but we do need some 2016 sensibilities.

There's a couple of popups but this first section is rather awful. Placing the pit very close to the spaceship, or having the basics of trap avoidance before you fall would of done a lot for this game. And it needs a lot.

Right away you find one of the respawn cubes. You'll be seeing these a lot.

All actual enemies I encountered 1-hit kill you, though the environmental hazards give you a small chance to get to the next cube.

First off are the Spikes. Hitting these causes a flashing red pain/alert full screen message to show and your oxygen tank to start dropping fast. I never saw it move on its own, only when I was hit. As you run out of oxygen your movement slows and you can't jump as high. Rush as fast as you can at a crawling rate for the next cube or just say 'fuck it' and hit the respawn key.

Second is the Lava. This is both stationary and falling and both rapidly increase the temperature of your suit. Allowing you to jump through it and find some place to quickly cool down. Before having to jump through the lava again.

Thirdly is the moving platforms. Not a direct hazard, but they have a habit of forcing you into spikes or lava. And in some cases they bug out and you don't move along with them. Or move along with them when you are no longer on them. Just hit respawn and swear at the broken mechanics.

And this is where everything breaks apart.

Yury slides around too much to control with any precision, in a game where you really need a good amount of movement controls to progress. The arrow keys I can learn and get around, but when the player just slides and bounces about with death traps all around it quickly ceases to be fun.

Platform edges sometimes catch you. Sometimes let you stand on them. Soemtimes you have to jump over to one on the same plane as it is a moving one. And sometimes you bump slightly off them to whatever lies below. Oh. And most of the time you will not know they are there until you risk falling and memorise their locations.

You only know what is lower down through trial and error. The game does a very poor job of telegraphing what you need to do next. Just drop and see what is there. Then respawn and do what you need to do. For a game that wants to be rock hard in difficulty, it does so in the most frustrating manner it can.

And while the Oxygen tank being damaged is not an instant kill. It may as well be.

In the end, I gave up trying to progress. I understand later areas introduce a gun, allowing you to combat different enemy types. But by death 80 and making slow but little progress I just could not be bothered continuing with this one.

While it uses basic pixel art, it is not terrible to look at and things are not hidden by graphic design or geometry, just by screen presence. Audio wise it is rather harmless, and a mix of PX speaker like sounds that reminds me of the 80s and early 90s.

I can't recommend this one. Fix the faults on basic platforming and I'd give it another go.

Game Acquisition: On Sale (Bundle Stars).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 4 December 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP
Processor: 2 GHz
Graphics: DirectX® 9.0c compatible
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 40 MB available space
Sound Card: any