Deleveled is a fairly simplistic puzzle platformer that revolves around one central mechanic – the exchange of momentum between a pair of blocks that you control.
The core gameplay is pretty simple – you control a pair of blocks, each of which is affected by exactly the opposite gravity as the other, with one being pulled down towards the bottom of the screen and the other being pulled up towards the top. The blocks move together, so anything one of them does, the other does as well. Your goal is to press a bunch of buttons, but the catch is that you can only press the buttons in pairs, simultaneously, one with each block. Once you have triggered all of the buttons, a pair of exits appear that you must enter simultaneously. Thus, you must manipulate the blocks such that you can do this.
The game has relatively few mechanics, but it makes solid use of them. First off, when the two blocks collide, if there’s only a thin surface between them, momentum will be exchanged between them. This means that they will oscillate back and forth, or, if you space it correctly, they will both bounce up and down at the same time.
While the blocks move together, it is possible to break their parity by moving one against some surface that they cannot move through while the other has no such barrier. This causes the two to be offset from one another, which allows you to solve many puzzles – but it has the catch that, due to their misalignment, it is no longer possible to exchange momentum between them without fixing their offset.
In addition, there’s a small number of other mechanics – platforms that you can manually raise/lower and move left/right, walls that become solid after going through them, walls that can only be travelled through in one direction, walls that disappear a second or so after touching them, as well as abilities that can be triggered to reverse gravity, cause the two blocks’ movement to be mirrored in opposite directions from one another, and blocks that shift the entire level 90 degrees.
At first, these mechanics are added one at a time, but by the end of the game, they are being frequently combined in levels, making for clever new puzzles.
The game is pretty straightforward, but the levels can be quite difficult in some cases; often, you need to make some essential insight in order to solve the levels, and typically, this can be worked out logically. Some of the levels can be solved in multiple different ways, and there’s even secret bonus levels accessible only with an additional difficult challenge on one of the levels out of every set of 10.
The game’s difficulty felt appropriate; each set of levels ramped up in difficulty, and the level sets ramped up in difficulty over the course of the game.
There’s 120 levels in this game, and it will probably take you about 18 hours to complete.
All in all, it felt rather decent to play. However, like a lot of games like this, it is hard to really be wowed by it; the mechanics are simple and fun enough, but the game will probably enter my memory as yet another puzzle game that I barely remember playing.
That isn’t necessarily an indictment of it, though; it was fun enough. But it isn’t the sort of thing that reaches anywhere near the heady reaches of games like Portal or The Talos Principle; it is a fairly simple indie game with no plot and simple graphics, intended to accomplish exactly what it set out to do and nothing else.
2.5