0 Degrees

I’ve never climbed a mountain before so I’m not in a position to comment if they have portals that teleport you from one area to another, or spikes that are shaped into perfect triangles. If they did, then Nerd Games & Kiddo Dev’s puzzle platformer 0 Degrees deserve a lot of praise for realism.

At A Glance

Visuals	6/ 10
Sound	4/ 10
Gameplay	6/ 10
Overall	4/ 10

Positives	+ Pixel art style
	+ Tight controls
	+ Later levels a real thinkers
Negatives	– Short and easy
	– Annoying soundtrack
	– Inconsistent slipping on objects

Published by eastasiasoft, 0 Degrees positions itself as a relaxing puzzle game where the goal is to navigate through a frosty tundra to the top of a mountain. All the action takes place on a single screen starting easy with tasks like jumping across a gap, before evolving into more complex puzzles. These involve activating switches, creating blocks and freezing platforms. Through the game’s forty levels, the difficulty rises although it never reaches the heights of impossible.

0 Degrees is your typical casual gaming experience – good in short bursts, but lacks real depth. Forty levels may seem like a lot to tackle, and considering one or two of the levels left me scratching my head, I rolled the credits within an hour. Similar games such as Super Meat Boy and even eastasiasoft’s other platformer, Rift Racoon, offers collectables extending the game’s lifespan whereas 0 Degrees forgoes all this for a quick finish and an easy Platinum Trophy. 0 Degrees is fun while it lasts, and with the blocky two dimensional pixel art style, it oozes charm but the short run time kills the experience. This isn’t helped by the music. The soundtrack is  fitting, but the one song, plinky-plonky approach had me reaching for the mute button around level 20.

Being billed as a casual platform game, 0 Degrees is a tight platforming experience that needs a degree (yep) of accuracy. When completing a jump, the explorer would come to a complete standstill, if the timing was off by a tiny amount, it would result in a quick restart. There were a few occasions where the developers remembered ice is slippery and I would careen off the cliff, but for the most part it was manageable.

0 Degrees is more half baked rather than Baked Alaska, a standard left to right platform game that is not only easy, but woefully short. There is so much promise; the art style is rather joyful and later levels add a little challenge but the game needs fleshing out. If there was a little more challenge or double the amount of levels, I’d recommend the game in a heartbeat.

In the interest of full disclosure, the publisher provided VGamingNews with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.