Nimbus Demo

Nimbus is a strange puzzle game that requires players to have very fine motor skills and a lot of patience.

Despite its cheerful music that reminds us of the golden age of gaming, Nimbus is a beast that will eat away your soul if you’re not careful. The developers from Noumenon Games are describing this as racing & puzzling combination. If you think that’s weird, you wouldn’t be wrong.

As soon as you open Nimbus you will understand why it’s difficult to say exactly where it fits. Saying that it’s a racing game is not correct since you won’t be racing anyone, but it’s fair to say that it’s a puzzle game. It’s no enough to survive during the course of a level, you also have to figure out how to finish it, and most of the time that’s the most difficult aspect.

The player controls a small craft or module that’s just launched. The vehicle doesn’t have any kind of propulsion, so the player needs to adapt the direction based on the inertia. From place to place you find different items that can properly you further.

In the first few levels, there is no punishment for missing the launch or hitting the walls, but as the game progresses more traps that can actually kill you are placed throughout the levels. Trying to survive with the initial boost is really difficult, and the player will often die and start over because he is missing the target by a few pixels.

Nimbus has the looks of a nice indie game that will help people unwind, but it does the complete opposite. Sometimes, when you think that you finally managed to finish a level, you will find that you still have a long way to go or that you don’t actually know what to do next. Most of the time you will die and try again because you misjudged a distance.

The craft can also slow down, which is sometimes useful, especially when it’s free falling, but it’s devious maneuver that will most likely get you killed. The demo only has the first few levels of the game, but they should be enough to teach any patient man the value of frustration.