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Airhead looks great, but its puffy platforming is a little lightweightIt’s taken every fibre of my being not to say ‘sucks’ - oh, goddamnit…
It’s taken every fibre of my being not to say ‘sucks’ - oh, goddamnit…
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Handy Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Handy Games
Airheadis one of thoseplatformersI really want to like. Freshly announced at tonight’s THQ Nordic Showcase, I’ve been playing an early, hour-long demo build of it this week, and while there are certainly things to admire here, I’m not overly convinced it’s going to be one for the ages. Its colourful visuals and contrasting colour palette cast its deep caverns and sun-drenched mountains in a beautiful, but eerie kind of light, and its strange, scuttling creatures put me in the mind of the night horrors fromDredgeandInsanely Twisted Shadow Planet. But its central premise of you being a headless body carting round an inflatable head to presumably escape to goodness knows where isn’t quite the breath of fresh air I hoped it would be.
Your inflatable head doesn’t have a very happy start… |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Handy Games
Okay, sure, not figuring out how to push/pull a rock might not sound like a particularly egregious problem, but there are deeper problems afoot that I worry can’t be rectified so easily. Correctly reading the landscape and picking up on the game’s various visual clues was a recurring problem I had in Airhead’s demo, and I consider myself to be fairly fluent in most of the tricks in the Metroidvania handbook. Minutes later, for example, I came across a small lake area. A black squid-like creature was nibbling on some kind of purple blob just in front of me, and the music took an ominous turn. This must be an enemy I need to avoid, I thought immediately. But the thing was completely harmless and didn’t react in the slightest when I swam near it - which I needed to in order to reach the next available ledge.
I wish Airhead was better, because its visual design is properly stunning. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Handy Games
Combined, well, you can probably see where this is going, can’t you? Mixing a pressure cooker environment of timed puzzle solving with often-unreadable play spaces is nothing short of a recipe for frustration. There’s little room for error or wrong-footed exploration, and while its air cannisters are mostly placed in sensible locations, the general exasperation of not being able to intuit at a glance what your next move should be makes Airhead feel like a lead balloon on your soul. I didn’t have a very good time with it, although if you think you’ll fare better you can try the very same demo now over onSteamfor free.
