#113 Spindizzy

Posted: 10th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
Tags: , , , ,

662nd played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Electric Dreams Software
Publisher: Electric Dreams Software/Activision

Spindizzy looks interesting. It uses the isometric perspective that’s quite popular in these days, but doesn’t use the human characters moving around and mostly looks like a version of Marble Madness. It’s not exactly that – instead it’s more of an exploration game like Knight Lore – and plenty others that I honestly haven’t been putting off, really – in how you explore an area.

Our Thoughts

Spindizzy is a big game, with loads of puzzles. There’s large, multi-screen mazes that make heavy use of moving between height levels and other tricks like it. There’s a lot to see and I feel like I only scratched the surface.

The downside is that I didn’t really manage to come to grip with the controls. The game heavily riffs on Marble Madness and the controls and physics are taken from this game. However, where that game relied on short, reflex based levels, here you are meant to solve more complicated puzzles and deal with longer stretches of precise movement. The focus is different and because of that, I struggled to see a lot – as always, I’m happy for Youtube.

This is even more because the game contains some really cool ideas and it’s a great one for its time that works out quite well. It’s a decent look and there are a lot of things the game manages to do with it that show how much everything in this genre had evolved compared to the references I mentioned earlier. It’s just a shame that the basics, the controls, are ones that are too hard for me to pick up for a casual session.