Alien Video Game Scientist

An alien spacecraft just entered the solar system, but all that's on board is a video game? As the world's Preeminent Video Game Scientist you've been tasked with solving this mystery. But you won't be alone; the unseen snarky narrator will be at you side the whole time, making sure you don't get all the credit and glory. Gameplay Each level is a navigation puzzle: how do I find the exit while collecting all the necessary or optional objects along the way, some of which may be hidden, or hard to reach? Levels are small & bite sized, but open ended with multiple paths. Find a fast enough path to unlock extra rewards, or just muddle thru for a casual experience. Speed running: optional but encouraged Causal/chill vibe players can enjoy the entire game at their own pace. BUT, for more challenge and some competition try to beat the in-game time trials or even complete in the Steam world leaderboards. Features: Not a precision platformer Death just means quick travel back to the last (user specifiable) checkpoint Mazes always have a tell, leading you in the right direction (But wander randomly, if you must) Soundtrack can be muted AT ANY TIME (but we hope you won't want to) Plays equally well with mouse or gamepad (all brands should work thru the magic of Steam Input) Verified to work on at least one Steam Deck, at least unofficially Our GAMEPLAY: a philosophical treatise A good collectathon lets you choose: the best path to get to the end, which collectables to get, and how efficient to be about the whole nonsense. That's the philosophy behind our levels: there is no single path through them, but there's probably a BEST way , which may not have been discovered yet (or even intended by the designer). Because large sprawling open world levels can get tiresome, with a lot of backtracking or getting lost, our levels are smaller, bite sized floating platforms where completing a level should never take more than 5 minutes. The only requirement is to get to the end of each level, and causal players can even search out the hidden skip level option, if desperate. But for extra challenge, collect all the things and do it (relatively) quickly . Rather than competing against a world leaderboard with ever diminishing odds of ever placing, our speedrun challenges are designed for a moderately motivated and moderately agile player to achieve given some planning, knowledge of the level layout, and at most a few retries to get it right. Rather than relying on split second timing, you'll get a lot further thinking about which regions to visit first, where to place the re-spawn point, etc.