Seiklus

Review by Botsu

"The John Lennon of PC Platformers"

In recent months I've tried to get back into keeping my eyes on indie games and I discovered only days ago that I've never played one of the most well received platformers in the independent gaming scene -- Seiklus, a game programmed by cly5m.

Seiklus has some interesting quirks that set it apart from most other platformers, namely that you can't lose. No matter what you do you will never "game over" or have to start back at the beginning because you saved in the wrong place and got stuck. This is achieved by there being nothing that can hurt you. There are enemies sure, but there are very few and the only thing they can do to you is to block you from going forward in the game or send you back to a previous screen.

However you cannot defeat enemies, because you cannot attack in any way at all. There is no violence, just platforming and exploration.

You may be asking yourself: Then what's the challenge? The answer is that the challenge of Seiklus lies in timed jumps and skillful moving.

Also there is no dialogue.
The whole premise of the game is that you've fallen off a cliff into a strange world and in that world you must collect all of the colored floaty bits hovering around everywhere. There's a menu that tells you how many of each color you've collected and what percentage of the game you've completed. There's also a number of items to collect in chests that help you along the way.

The controls are eloquent and simple: left and right arrow keys move you, up arrow key to jump, s key to save your game, and spacebar to see your inventory screen.

To accent this simplistic journey are water-color-like backgrounds and music that is very reminiscent of the commodore 64 or atari 2600. Marvelously done.

Artistically speaking Seiklus is a testament to minimalism and pure form. You have one main goal, and you have very simple controls. You have a small world to explore and very little to help you along the way. Seiklus proves that you do not need sex or violence in order to make an action based game very fun and rewarding. It proves that you do not need a complicated story to get your message across.

Gameplay 10: Nothing you'd need to spend time perfecting, but endearing enough to keep you hooked. I'd call that perfect.
Graphics 7: Beautiful computer drawn graphics that are very simple.
Music 10: Very catchy and fitting. Very retro.
Story 9: It's implicit. Stories do not need to be complicated to be good.

Seiklus is a fantastic game that anybody can play and nobody should miss. It is pure brilliance.
Go to cly5m's website and download the game, you have nothing to lose.