Have You Played... Splasher?
Portal 2's paints in a platformer
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Splasher [official site] is a platform game about paint with properties like making you bounce or speed up.
Yes, that makes it a lot like a 2D Portal 2, but that's no bad thing. What makes Splasher work is its level design, which uses the paint in conjunction with the main character's cleaning water spray to create jumping challenges requiring precision and careful timing.
For example, there might be a tall series of jumps that require bouncy paint to complete, next to two spinning cannons, one of which is spraying the bouncy paint and another of which is spraying water to wash it off. You need to time your jumps to avoid landing on a recently cleaned patch and tumbling back to the ground below.
The paints are combined in a bunch of interesting ways, but the rules are simple enough that at times it's possible to enter a flow state, beating challenges without stopping even as you see them for the first time. Aside from Portal 2, it reminds me of Dustforce - only I like Splasher better.
