Environmental Station Alpha Demo

Environmental Station Alpha is a simple and straightforward action platformer developed by Arvi Teikari and Roope Mäkinen, and published by Hempuli Oy.

When people hear the words “2D action platformer” I don’t thing that they have Environmental Station Alpha in mind, but it’s pretty much the definition of such a game. If you like to control a character in a 2D environment, while shooting enemies, and generally having fun, then you might find Environmental Station Alpha to be more than just a little bit entertaining.

It’s a very trendy right now to build 2D games that look very ancient, but that’s probably true for many other things, like fashion, cars, and many other things. Sometimes it makes sense to have games that looked like they reached their pick back in the 1990s, but most of the time they are just developers trying to benefit from the user’s love of old games. Fortunately, Environmental Station Alpha doesn't seem to suffer the same fate.

An abandoned space station comes back to life, and no one really knows why. A robot is sent to the station in the hopes that it will find out why it was compromised in the first place and where are the signals coming from. It’s a thin thread, but it seems to be just enough to keep the story going.

The players control the robot, which has only some basic features when it lands, which is the ability to jump and to fire an energy weapon. As soon as you enter the space station, all kind of alien life will try to kill you, but dodging them is not difficult since they are pretty predictable. The weapon can be upgraded, along with the life gauge and the jump power.

The thing that will either entice players or drive them away is the graphics in all of its 8-bit splendor. Imagine playing something like this on a really big monitor, and you might understand why it would be difficult for some people to even try it.

I can only say that despite the graphics, Environmental Station Alpha offers quite an experience and that once you get in the game, you will forget all about the fact that you can probably count all the pixels in one sitting.