Reviews - Persus-9

NightSky is a rolling puzzle platformer, like Gumboy Crazy Adventures or to a certain extent Gish. You (mostly) control a circle rolling across a series of 2D screens. It does have a few neat tricks of its own, the times when it puts you in a vehicle or totally removed control of your ball and gives you control over various aspects of the environment are funny little breaks from the formula. It also have a very nice interesting difficulty curve for a puzzle game. Too many puzzle games just get harder as you go on and each puzzle beaten is replaced by one which is harder which really kills the sense of accomplishment at times. NightSky has on average gradually increasing difficulty and no particular spikes but it has a lot of difficulty peaks where it throws in some very trivial levels to make you feel awesome.

It has a plot or rather it has an opening cut scene and a closing cut scene which both feature the real world counterpart of the apparently dream world ball you're controlling. It is basically just a short bit of nonsense to bookend the game.

The puzzles and the controls are both pretty nice though. It does what it does pretty well, is it just a shame it feels like a cut down version of Gumboy with a different aesthetic. It is about five hours long to get through the main campaign on normal without bothering to collect the stars to unlock the bonus level or doing the alternate mode. Goodness knows how long it would take to do every but it didn't leave me with the desire to find out right now. The main campaign doesn't outstay its welcome or repeat itself too much. The sound track is nice. All in all I had fun with it and it is far from a bad game but if you have choice between this and Gumboy then I'd find it hard to recommend wholeheartedly simply because Gumboy is better. If on the other hand you enjoyed Gumboy and want that same rolling platform puzzler itch scratched or can't get hold of Gumboy then go for it.