Fetch Your Shades: Deepak Fights Robots
In October 2009 I very rightly was enormously excited by the lunatic joy of RunMan. Its infectious brightness and unhinged glee were a big part of that. Developer Tom Sennett has picked up on the same vibe in his latest game, the brilliantly named Deepak Fights Robots (if you do nothing else, click on that link). It's a puzzle platform game, heavily inspired by Bubble Bobble, but, well, brighter.
Deepak is a family man and office worker, who finds himself transported to a mad world of single-screen levels in which he must collect all the - atoms? - in order to briefly transform into a superhero and duff up the room's robotic villains. You can see it in action here, in a trailer that almost entirely shows deaths:
The wonderful sitar funk appears throughout the game, in increasingly surreal and eye-distorting levels. And it's a lot of fun. The challenges don't ramp up too quickly, and there's infinite lives to ensure things are focused on fun. There's bunches of bonuses to collect, including further nods to Bubble Bobble in the form of fruit and letters. (I've yet to find an umbrella that lets me skip levels.) And my favourite feature are the "shields", animal friends that'll accompany you, and take the brunt of a collision with a robot. On death the robots will occasionally make remarks, and I think this must be the first game in which the baddies have offered "MY CONDOLENCES" after I've died.
It's presented in Sennett's distinctive and adorable hand-scribbled design, and have I mentioned it's colourful? Sennett is charging $10 (£6.22) for the game that took two years to develop, which you can get here. It comes DRM free, with lifetime updates.