We’re not sure what debtors have done to SharkGames in the past. Not only do debtors owe crippling debt but, when they die, they go to Debtor’s Hell, where they spend their time collecting cash as a kind of penance – all while demons and vampires chase them. Is this what student loan owners have awaiting them? It’s a tad harsh, we’d say.
I don’t think we can criticise Debtor: Enhanced Edition for its anti-debt stance. But we found it funny in a brutal, please-don’t-be-true kind of way. Honestly, we’re still paying off our fridge. Don’t send us to Fridge Debt Hell.
It’s more important to know that Debtor: Enhanced Edition is that indie staple: the puzzle platformer. We feel like we’ve been writing this a lot recently: it’s thirty levels of box-pushing in an attempt to access and leave an exit, where you’re propelled onto further challenges.
As the slick-haired gent of Debtor: Enhanced Edition, you have the ability to pull off a dinky jump that won’t get you particularly far. Luckily, you have some handy upper body strength that enables you to push a box. Through pushing crates and then stepping on them, you can reach platforms that you otherwise wouldn’t. Simple and easy to understand.
Lesser games would stop there, but Debtor: Enhanced Edition has some back-up abilities that make things interesting. Debtor borrows from Legend of Zelda, as – for reasons we can’t quite fathom – you have a stash of bombs. Perhaps the bomb addiction was why the moustachioed man owed money in the first place. So, you can drop these bombs to explode crates and gravel-like squares, which might be what you need to bypass them as obstacles.
Debtor Dude, as we’re now calling him, can also use his pent up fury to dash into rocks, but only from the side. It’s a simple enough ruleset: if you need to destroy from the top, use a bomb; if it’s from the side, use a dash. And if you want to make use of that block, then push it.
But as any Sokoban fan will tell you, pushing blocks gets complicated. You might be able to push and pull in Debtor: Enhanced Edition, but you can’t lift a box up from where it’s stuck, so you need to be careful. Push a block off a ledge and you can’t magically beam it back, so you need to plan things in sequence.
This is where Debtor: Enhanced Edition thrives. It lives in the place where multiple actions could be done, but knowing which order to do them is the puzzle. One puzzle might need you to sacrifice a block to a bomb, while another might have you working from the top down, collecting the first of the three coins you need to complete a level, before lobbing boxes off ledges and into the lower reaches.
There are enemies, but you needn’t worry about them. They don’t represent combat, nor do they hunt you down and kill you. They’re just something to keep an eye on, and jump over if things get tense. Honestly, we didn’t die to them once, so you can consider them a moving obstacle.
Debtor: Enhanced Edition is great at getting you to embrace failure. Rather than necessarily die, you can absolutely get stuck. We lost count of the times that we confidently collected three coins but forgot that we needed a path to the exit door. Or we collected the coins in the wrong order, leaving one in a pit that we definitely couldn’t escape from. But Debtor: Enhanced Edition has a swift restart button, and you can be back to the start of the level in barely a second. Puzzles are rarely bigger than a game screen, so you’re never losing too much.
There’s an argument that thirty levels isn’t enough, that Debtor: Enhanced Edition is not only completable over forty-five minutes, but it offers 1000G for less than five minutes play. It absolutely could have stuck around for longer, and we would have played extra levels, but sometimes it’s best to leave your players wanting more, and Debtor: Enhanced Edition does exactly that. For £4.19, it’s a steal.
Where Debtor: Enhanced Edition slightly lets itself down is performance. It’s partial to a bit of slowdown and there’s the occasional delay to the basic jump. We found ourselves slowing down on the approach to a jump and dying as a result. Why this is a problem with a game that’s as simple as Debtor: Enhanced Edition is a real conundrum.
It’s also not got that kickass, game-changing mechanic that sets it apart. There’s a sense that Debtor: Enhanced Edition is pilfering from a lot of games, rather than creating anything unique. But we’ll let it go, mostly because of the price tag, but also because the levels are well crafted. If you’re going to borrow, at least be good at it. And Debtor: Enhanced Edition is pretty good.
Debtor: Enhanced Edition may not have been on your radar, but perhaps it should be. It’s an unfussy, well-made little puzzle-platformer that is in debt to other games (ha!), but is made with care by people who know they’re way around creating a level.
On finishing it, we put down the pad, satisfied that we got our money’s worth from Debtor: Enhanced Edition. And for £4.19, it’s not going to send you to Debtor’s Hell, either.
You can buy Debtor: Enhanced Edition from the Xbox Store
