PC

“Would you like to see the cleverest thing you’ve ever seen?” I asked my wife as she fought with a series of plugs and a vivarium. “Er, in a minute,” she replied, failing to recognise the value I bring to her every waking moment. I wanted to show her a short sequence in MotionRec, a platform puzzler that is so incredibly smart that I can’t stand to keep it all to myself.

What I want to show her is a sequence in which I need to get my little pixelly robo-dude past a staircase of deadly spikes, none of which it can touch. To do this, I “record” my guy climbing a set of non-deadly stairs, and then “play” that recorded sequence of movement in front of the spiky flight. He then repeats the same movements but without needing the platforms beneath him this time, landing safely on the other side of all the spikes.

Laura’s not nearly impressed enough for my liking, but then again, perhaps she had the instinctive knowledge that MotionRec hadn’t even gotten started on how clever it was going to be.

At its most basic, this means of movement can be as simple as a neat way to reach a high platform. You record yourself jumping up a series of vertical-stacked platforms, and then, stood on the ground below your target, replay that recorded to jump up through the thin air until you reach it. At its most complicated, you’re triggering a time-reversal beacon and then reversing the steps you want to be able to replicate such that you can record when you’re being reversed back to where you started, then using this created path to loop through a series of “play” button icons to traverse multiple screens.

But as hard as that might sound, joyfully it starts to become so very instinctive. In fact, that simple height-gaining technique becomes as second-nature as a double-jump in another game, a thing you just unthinkingly perform after a while, such that the vastly more elaborate moves are far less of a reach.

In fact, it’s rarely the super-crazy screens-long moves that are a big challenge (oftentimes they’re a sweet little bonus that cunningly uses an already-recorded pattern), but rather sequences that look maddeningly simple. I just need to get to the other side of this gap! That’s all! So why can’t I figure out the technique? Have I gone mad? Am I a moron?! Well, yes and yes, but also when figuring it out I’ve frequently declared to my empty room that “I’m a genius!”

I’m in one of those moments right now, actually. I was pretty sure I was about to finish the game as I reached its much-flagged 15th level, ready to tell you all to play this amazing game immediately, and thinking myself terribly clever for having managed to finish it. It turns out it’s a bluff, and given it’s generally quite annoying when games do this to you (it’s weird, but you get it, right? you can start to resent a game a bit for carrying on when you thought it was ending) I don’t think it takes away anything to tell you. But yeah, this game is 30 levels long, and that second half…hoo boy! It’s so good, but it’s demanding!

MotionRec is utterly amazing. It’s brilliantly clever, rewardingly challenging, and the aesthetic is completely delightful. It’s far more instinctive than you might worry, but then offers a challenge that rises to meet your skill. It’s one of those games you’ll want to call someone else in to see. I’m calling you now! Come in! See this!

• HANSUM / PLAYISM
• Steam
• £8/$10/€10
• Official Site

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