Be not eaten by aliens in Professor Lupo And His Horrible Pets

Platform-painting puzzler Nihilumbra gathered some affection around these parts back in 2013. Creators BeautiFun Games have now released Professor Lupo And His Horrible Pets, a cheerful top-down puzzler about fleeing hungry alien beasties.

Lupo claims to be a scientist but strikes me as more of a space cat lady who just hates interns and enjoys feeding them to his pets. You're one of these hapless goops, human bait for whatever he's up to this week, when missiles hit the station and you realise you're 100 puzzley levels away from freedom.

I've had a brief play and its trailers get across its narrative element, but they kind of obscure what a typical level is actually like. So far: promising. It's roughly one-third a case of working out the right order in which to open and close doors, one-third timing challenge, one-third exploiting the predictable behaviour of the various aliens, and one secret space-maths third jokes and general plot updates from a few crew and the onboard AI.

"Story and puzzles" risks entering "nuts and gum" territory, but I was into Professor Lupo with the bare minimum of preamble, and it seems happy to let you play and skip the text/voice if that's your bag. It's out now on Steam for a temporarily discounted £11.46/$12.74/€12.74.