Short Life

A trap platformer where the character is a ragdoll and the levels are corridors of things designed to take them apart. Spikes, saws, falling weights, mines — each level is a sequence of them, and the comedy is in the failure, which is why the restart is instant and the deaths are the most animated thing in the game. Underneath the slapstick it is a precise game. The traps are static and the timing windows are fixed, so the first attempt at a level is reconnaissance and every attempt after it is execution; nothing is random, and a level that has killed you fifteen times will eventually be a ten-second walk. The ragdoll physics make the character slightly harder to control than a rigid one, which is the intended handicap rather than a flaw. Levels are short, there are plenty of them, and the difficulty curve adds trap combinations rather than reflex demands. It plays with three inputs on a keyboard or on-screen buttons, runs on anything, and is not suitable for very young children given the cheerfully gruesome deaths. Fair, repetitive in the right way, and over quickly either way. There is no score and no timer, only whether a level is cleared, which keeps the focus on the route. Later stages combine three or four trap types in a single corridor, and those are the ones worth the twenty attempts they take.