The rounded edges of an old computer monitor glinting from a nearby mass of cabling. My favourite moments were always the quiet ones, though: a secret room with a bit of story going on and remnants of someone long departed. The ductwork can look like Psycho Fox one moment and 2000AD the next, and I never stopped marvelling at the cludgy, pistony loveliness of the robots that were trying to kill me, sprouting drill bits, firing rockets from their metal mouths, or hanging overhead with funny little propellers and dropping deadly frogs. Its tunnels and underground facilities are picked out in thick blocks of black and white, and this black and white is astonishingly atmospheric. Gato Roboto opts for big pixels and a monochrome art palette. This brings me to the second thing that marked Gato Roboto out for me. Yes, I appreciate in this way the cat has quite a lot to do with nuts and bolts design, but none of that matters, I think, quite as much as this: it's unexpected and delightful to play as a cat in a game, particularly one who's animated with such character and economy. The cat soon has a mech-suit - I can attest to the fact that cats are like this - and the game has a lot of fun switching between sections where you're suited and tooled up and deadly and bulky, and sections where you jump out of the suit and scamper up walls and through pipes and underwater, but have to avoid direct confrontation. The first thing is you play through the game as a cat, crashlanded on an alien planet and trying to save his human owner who's trapped back at the spaceship. And tellingly, neither of them has much to do with nuts and bolts design. Gato Roboto does two things that immediately shook the formula up for me. I can appreciate how ingenious it is that a certain area works differently depending on whether it's on fire or filled with toxic gas, but it can take something truly special to shake me out of quiet reverence for someone's design smarts. It can be slightly enervating, being blinded by all that brilliance. I've played plenty of Metroidvanias that were very easy to admire but a bit of a drag to play.
Metroidvanias are an inherently clever genre, and the cleverness can sometimes sap a little of the energy. A venerable template comes alive in this beautifully compact adventure.
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