In a discussion about mutable terrain somebody mentioned e7, which turned out to be pretty amazing. The first, most obvious standout is the gorgeous visuals:
These static shots don’t do it justice. You really need to see the parallax, lighting, and the little details like meteors or ships crashing in the background to fully appreciate it. Although very sparse, the world does also have some nice little touches like the sunken ruins you can see in the first screen shot.
Excellently complementing those empty, haunted scenes is some similarly quiet, eery audio. Most of it consists of just the wind blowing and occasional beeps and knocks as you do things, with just a few musical notes to accent the mood. It’s very subdued and conveys a quiet, exploratory, introspective atmosphere perfectly.
Finally, the gameplay is pretty novel. You slide around the world like a little hockey punk of a drone or ship, deforming the terrain (maybe via some local gravity generator or something???) and then releasing to launch yourself around as it rebounds. Using this you need to jump and wall jump between platforms, as well as hurl yourself at unfriendlies to knock them apart. It’s a really interesting mechanic and implemented well, it all runs really smoothly even on my older laptop.
The one downside of the game is that I think it takes the mechanic a bit too far. Some of the fights are very difficult, time consuming, and very easy to fail at the last moment and have to start all over. I couldn’t bring myself to play through the last third of the game and wound up watching a YouTube recap to catch some highlights and the end of the story. The latter was also somewhat predictable, but basically the way it had to be given the atmosphere.
So, e7’s not a game that I think has a ton of replay value or long term engagement as it’s somewhat of a 1-trick pony, but it’s well worth giving it a play for the great aesthetic and the novel gameplay mechanics. You can check it out on Jay is Games as well as a bunch of other places.