I’m old. Well, I remember when everything was corded and most of the time I still prefer it that way. I’ll cling to my corded keyboard and mouse for decades to come! This is where Robot Detour comes in. In this top-down puzzle game, we take control of a robot with a never-ending extension cord. Our task is to deliver batteries to our wireless robot friends, but each level is full of spike objects and traps to catch us out and break our cord. Can we survive and recharge our chums?
Robot Detour is utterly charming from the start. The simple premise presents us with single-screen challenges which graphically sit somewhere between a block puzzle and a blueprint. You move your robot around and a bright orange cord drags behind you. Each level is designed so that you can’t get directly to the battery or robot and so you need to work out the best indirect route to get there that avoids all the evil red spikey traps. These traps are often placed on wall corners or at an angle that blocks your easy path, and that means you’ll need to wrap yourself around other walls, blocks and machine cogs to line yourself up nicely to reach your goal.
There are six worlds in Robot Detour and each has its own unique theme and twist. One has switches that move when you pick up the battery, meaning it’ll usually drag your cord with it directly into the path of danger. Another revolves around cogs that open and close pathways. This requires you to often overshoot where you need to go and then double back to reverse the cog and open a pathway. Mirror World has you looking at two versions of yourself but the world itself is different and requires so left-brain/right-brain thinking. There is also a world where traps move around and you time movements like a stealth mission to reach your goal. In a rare move, you can choose to make this entire world optional and skip it. Every other world relies on figuring out the puzzle, rather than dexterity and clearly the developers don’t want anyone to be locked out of the game through manual platforming skills. Their kindness extends to levels unlocking in batches so you can pick and choose from several to complete. On the flip side, the hint system is a progressive one that draws out a bit of the solution but never gives you the full answer. I used the hints a few times and still felt like I earned my win each time.
Levels are broken into tiers of difficulty for each world and there are 88 in total. There is a lot of game here for the price point and whilst the levels never reach a dizzying complexity, they don’t need to. The somewhat freeform way players can solve levels means that you can arrive at different solutions. I saw some other players reaching far more elegant solutions to some levels where I’d wrapped my cord around everything and I didn’t need to. My solution was clearly better though given that I’d put in ten times more effort…! I also really liked the way the undo feature is designed for Robot Detour. You can choose to restart the whole level but if you select undo, it moves you back to when you last made a directional decision. This means you can undo moves rather than have to start again and this allows you to try new ideas quickly and easily.
I had a blast playing Robot Detour. It has the same scrappy personality that I attribute to the best of the flash games you’d enjoy in the mid-2000s. I mean that as a huge compliment. Everything here feels thoughtfully designed and handcrafted without ever being showy. It is a fantastic puzzle game and one that has me chasing a 100% perfect run without hints on a second playthrough without even questioning it. Buy it.
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