While these days it isn’t uncommon to see a variety of games in the eShop that are billed as being challenging from the get-go, going back to the earlier days you didn’t see them very often. One of the titles I remember being the toughest when I was young was Lunar Lander, which also inspired quite a lot of clones of various kinds. It turns out that trying to safely land your spaceship on a planet while fighting gravity and some other factors was tricky, and I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment as I was able to get used to feathering my thrusters to get my ship into position and to set down as gently as possible.

Now, given that challenging games have clearly come into their own, with titles like Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight, and many more doing quite well financially, it’s nice to see a game like Nullstar honoring at least aspects of that classic gravity-defying design. Of course, simply getting yourself into position and carefully feathering to get yourself landed in one piece is no longer enough. Nowadays the challenge needs to be cranked up. So the developers’ solution to that problem was to essentially take the gravity-fighting element of that classic and implement it into a speed-running platformer of sorts. Your objective, on paper, is pretty simple. You just need to navigate the level while collecting nullstar fragments and avoiding what becomes a fair variety of traps. To the game’s credit, you will have your choice of ships that have different attributes to work with the further you go, but none of them by any means make any of this easy.

So yeah, this is a title that’s going to test you. Whether that’s your reflexes, your ability to anticipate and choose precisely the right moment to move, or even sometimes just figuring out how best to navigate the level, you’re going to have to work to get through this. The one feature I’m not sure works very intuitively, and I found myself more often trying to avoid using than getting help from, involves turning off some of your thrusters in order to strengthen the others. On paper this is a pretty sensible concept, but in practice I’m less convinced it works very well. The first issue is that the challenge times the game provides for you to beat are already tough enough. Wasting even a moment or two while making sure you’ve turned off the thrusters in the proper direction will tend to slow you down. Worse, I would regularly either get confused whether I was going by the direction I wanted to move in, or the direction the thrusters were pointed in. Throw in that I’d regularly think that I’d already pressed the button to turn some thrusters off, only to then realize that I hadn’t, could often serve as an aggravation. I still like the core gameplay offered, I just wish they’d found another solution for how to improve your thrusters that didn’t require additional thought and time to execute.