Wibble Wobble

Daniel Linssen is an indie game dev that manages to always pull a creative rabbit out of his hat. His games are always atmospheric, and that’s part of why they’re very good. Another, despite the fact that they’re often short, is that they put the player face to face with interesting mechanics or creative gameplay.

Wibble Wobble is another of his creations, a pixel art survival platformer in which you’re basically a dotted ‘i’ that needs to stay alive until it gets the highest score possible. The game is Daniel’s entry for the Indies VS Gamers challenge, and it’s built in 72 hours.

Platformer environments are rarely this treacherous

In most platformers in which it’s imperative to stay alive, the ground you step on is solid and stays like that while projectiles or enemies are hurled at you. In Wibble Wobble things couldn’t be any more different.

Here, the ground wibbles and wobbles in a random pattern making it immensely tough to accurately plan your jumps. The aim of the game is to walk the ever wobbling terrain to gain score points. These are awarded to you per second, and collecting floating stars adds a score multiplier.

It’s challenge comes from the fact that you can’t stay in one place because there are things that can kill you. Your enemies take on the form of spikes that can appear out of the blue since the ground constantly moves up and down. That pushes you to keep going, jumping from one place to another, only to have to deal with the spikes that are visible. When it comes to the latter, the same random ocean-wave like ground movement makes it very hard to plan or even stick a landing.

Simple, eerie, challenging

There’s not a lot to Wibble Wobble and that’s totally fine since it is a game jam build. However, as far as the challenge goes, it’s there, and it’s real. Like in all of Daniel’s games, expect for even this little game to have an excellent soundtrack. The atmosphere is very mellow, a bit eerie even and it’s just what you need to stay focused.

For the fly by gamer

To end, Wibble Wobble is something you play when there’s a bit of time to kill. It does get tedious after a while, but if you’re into finding real challenges, set a score in your mind and see if you can achieve it.