A Short and Sweet Platforming Puzzle
Platformers come in all shapes and sizes. There are dozen hour games with challenging combat, deep mechanics, and a vast amount of exploration. And then there are highly linear platformers with self-contained levels and minimal variations in the gameplay structure.
Ellphaser falls into the second camp.
Simple Structure, Focused Fun
Now, that may sound like a scathing indictment of the game. After all, bigger is usually advertised as better. Every new game usually brags about its countless hours of gameplay, but so often that becomes tedious busy work with a never-ending checklist of collectibles to clear that don’t actually add anything to the experience.
Ellphaser is not that kind of game at all. It’s a highly linear platformer with 40 levels and a straightforward gameplay mechanic that doesn’t change much at all throughout its one-hour playtime.
Red and Blue Realities: Ellphaser’s Unique Phasing Mechanic
You are a cute elephant that needs to travel from one end of the stage to the other, where a door awaits you. Along the way are platforms, traps, and optional gems to collect in the event you want some added challenge. The central mechanic is that every time you jump, red and blue blocks will shift in and out of existence. It’s a very simple, yet effective mechanic. Planning out the next jump is important, and rushing through can easily cause a slip up.
Ellphaser’s controls are tight and responsive, and failure always felt like my own mistake. Out of all the levels, only one had a jump that felt overly challenging, but beyond that the game was a very straightforward platformer without any unnecessary wrinkles in the formula.
Level Design and Hazards
What caught me off guard most is that I expected my playtime to be around 30 minutes for this game, but when I got the last achievement and saw my game stats, an hour and 20 minutes had passed. So many of these bite sized games often have the opposite effect, where an hour of gameplay feels like it drags on for an eternity. Again, it isn’t a long game but after playing through it from start to finish, it didn’t feel like it overstayed its welcome.
The last batch of levels does mix up the formula a bit by introducing new hazards. Spikes are added fairly early on, but eventually the spikes will also function with the same logic as the blocks. Some will be marked red, and the rest will be blue and every time you jump, spikes will alternate as well.
There is a small grace period during this transition, though. Jumping while standing where spikes would spawn won’t result in death. Well, unless you let your elephant fall straight back down onto them.
Blocks also get added that don’t phase out of existence but will grow a spike for the first jump and retract it during the next. Functionally, it isn’t much different than just missing a jump, with the only real change being that you die a bit quicker. And in some cases when you miss a jump you can land on a lower block, while the spike trap doesn’t have that leniency.
Checkpoints and Replayability in Ellphaser
But either way, the levels are compact enough that failure doesn’t result in much lost time. Levels also typically have a checkpoint at the halfway point, which makes the entire experience fairly relaxed. There were one or two times when the checkpoint didn’t trigger properly, and I had to restart the level after dying. But even then it didn’t really faze me, and replaying the first section of the level wasn’t an issue.
Another thing that caught me completely off guard is that Ellphaser is a 2000 Gamerscore game. Again, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to finish the achievement list, and the last handful of achievements only added a few minutes to that playtime. Probably the most tedious of these were the ones that required me to manually restart the game to unlock them. Dying automatically restarts a level and as far as I saw, there wasn’t any way for me to soft lock any of the levels. This means the only reason you would potentially use the restart level button during an actual play through would be if you missed a gem and couldn’t retrace your steps to collect them.
Gems and Challenge
There are some achievements related to collecting these gems, but enough are collected just passively that makes unlocking those achievements incredibly easy. Ironically, there is an achievement for completing five levels without collecting any gems, and that actually required more effort and planning than collecting them. It actually made for a relatively fun challenge.
However, by the end of the game, there are several levels that are laid out to be incredibly easy to finish, but the gems are much more complicated to collect. For these levels, whether or not you take the time to collect the gems determines how hard you’ll find them.
A Bite-Sized Platformer with Retro Charm
At the end of my time with Ellphaser, I felt like I had just finished playing an old school flash game, like I would’ve played during computer lab in grade school. And yes, that used to be a thing, I swear.
Ellphaser is an affordable game that will give you about an hour of entertainment. The gameplay is simple but fun, and you’ll easily get 2000 Gamerscore out of it. It ends just about at the right time too, refusing to ever try to be anything more than what it is.
If you like bite-sized games, then Ellphaser is worth checking out.
Important Links
Jump into Reality-Bending Puzzles: Ellphaser Launches on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/jump-into-reality-bending-puzzles-ellphaser-launches-on-xbox-playstation-and-pc/
Grab a download of Ellphaser on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/ellphaser/9P7HCW2CCQ2S/0010
Or buy the Bundle – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/ellphaser-xbox-bundle/9PBVPLVSWMTZ/0010
