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As superpowers go, Little Disaster – the main character of Little Disaster – has one of the worst. It can jump, but every time it does, it leaves behind an explosive blast. We’re trying to imagine situations where that would be useful rather than terrible, and we’re coming up short. Basically, they’re a walking pothole machine. Local Facebook groups would hate them.
Petite Games have an answer to our original question. They manage to turn the explodey-jump into a good thing by building a platformer around it. Across seventy levels, Little Disaster has to reach a crystal that represents the exit. Clearly they’re a meth-head. But that crystal is inevitably above them, with various jumps and walls in the way. The only way to get there is well-timed and well-positioned (not to mention, controlled) boom-jumps.
It’s your classic gameplay gimmick in an indie platformer, and it’s a pretty good one. It’s got a simple tension at the heart of it. An explosion will get you to a platform, but that explosion will obliterate the platform you came from. Miss your jump, and you might not have the starting point that you once had. If the puzzle wants you to backtrack over a previous platform, it’s a similar story.
There’s another nobble when it comes to blasting through walls. You can create a gap to move through, but you have to be careful about where you stand. It’s all too possible to blow a hole in the floor, sending you tumbling offscreen. These two problems form the majority of Little Disaster’s levels.
Not that the level designers leave it there. There are some well-designed level ingredients here, all solved with a nuclear hop-skip and jump. TNT boxes explode if hopped on, chaining together to destroy something you may have (or may not have) wanted to destroy. Target-blocks are basically keys that open locks, as you need to destroy all of them to open an exit (actual keys appear too). And there are blocks that kill you if you bounce on them, alongside blocks that can’t be destroyed at all.
They are remixed into some entertaining levels. There’s always a theoretical problem to solve. Can you activate all the switches in a level, but still have enough of a level left to reach the exit? Can you get to the crystal when the level is mostly made of TNT blocks? Little Disaster has formed a cunning toolbox with plenty to construct a level. We could have imagined a level construction kit in Little Disaster, as those levels are not much more than a grid with the same pieces shuffled about.
You wouldn’t need user-generated levels to bulk out the game, though. Little Disaster is a healthy seventy levels, spread across four biomes. It’s welcoming to completionists and achievement hunters alike: if you played every level, you’re playing for roughly four hours, which is a good hour-per-pound ratio. But if you’re only after the achievements, you can skip to the pertinent levels and get your 1000G over an hour.
Some issues drag it down. Little Disaster, the character, is basically a ball, and that means some imprecise jumps. You can land on a platform, only to roll back off again. Equally, you might miss a jump but have just enough momentum and friction to roll yourself onto the platform. But it doesn’t half feel random, leaving you questioning why a jump failed this time when it worked rather well before.
We encountered a fair few inconsistencies and we couldn’t tell you if they were designed or bugs. We’re guessing the latter, but they happened so often that we wondered if we simply didn’t understand the rules properly. We would reach platforms, only for Little Disaster to say ‘nuh-uh’ when we tried to explode. They would loll about, giving us some sass, refusing to jump again. It’s only when we moved to another platform that the jump would work again, so it’s not a move-limitation or anything like that.
The fringes of the game screen are another one. Sometimes we would fall into the void and die, and we could understand – that makes sense, and you can restart so easily that it’s never an issue. But other times, Little Disaster would be glued to the platform and refuse to jump again. We began to think that Little Disaster was just a primadonna who fancied the odd day off.
It’s a shame because there’s a clever and compact game here. Without those inconsistencies, we might have hung an extra half mark on the scoreboard. It’s not overly original – it is, after all, just a basic platformer with an allergy to backtracking – but it’s subversive enough to create the odd fiendish level, to get you doing something you’ve never done before.
As it turns out, a superpower of being able to explode when you jump isn’t all that helpful. You’re often trying to get out of your own way in Little Disaster, and that’s a neat twist. It makes for a deft puzzle-platformer that bucks convention. It’s only undone by some glitches and inconsistencies which never quite make you feel in control.
Little Disaster is one that we can recommend, but you should be wary that it could explode in your hands at any point.