Culminating in an ending that may be the best use for Miiverse ever created, Affordable Space Adventures is not only one of the best Wii U eShop exclusives out there, but one of the best Wii U games, period.
Solutions can require a bit of dexterity, but generous checkpoints guarantee this to be a puzzle trip that’s more on the relaxing side, so that while the ship may blow up several times along the way, hopefully players won’t. With heavily-armed robots sensitive to different outputs like sound, heat, or electricity, the levels of thrust, anti-gravity and the numerous other abilities must be modified or even turned off to safely pass. As its systems reboot, the ship has access to more functions, all of which appear on and can be manipulated from the gamepad touchscreen. Affordable Space Adventures takes the humorous premise of a space vacation gone very wrong and through it delivers an atmospheric puzzler involving guiding a beat-up star ship through an alien world. While Nintendo still tries to make a case for the unique features possible on the gamepad, Danish indie developers Knapnok Games and Swedish gamemaker Nifflas ( Night Sky) have already succeeded.
The difficulty ramps up perfectly, with collecting every treasure along the way a pleasurable obsession, and those who find the early challenges too easy will have their hands full with the plentiful post-story levels. Brimming with the company’s usual charm and colorful visuals expected from anything taking place in the Mario universe, what makes Treasure Tracker actually so enjoyable is the creative ways in which the diorama-style stages are constructed, presenting the grounded Captain with a maze of tricky paths and cleverly hidden gems that require tilting the gamepad to examine the stages from every possible angle. It didn’t take a Nintendo genius to realize that the puzzle mini game distractions that occasionally popped up in Super Mario 3D World needed their own chance to shine in a separate, solo game, and that feeling was validated when we received Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. With a wonderfully textured visuals rendered from clay sculptures, a mind-bending philosophical story, and a rich, spooky atmosphere The Swapper is one of the most satisfying puzzle experiences available anywhere. The only tools and abilities you’ll ever need are given right at the outset, so from then on full attention can be paid to simply figuring out the increasingly complex rooms the developers have concocted, and the many traps that add new wrinkles and twists to the gameplay. Only by cloning your character, transferring your soul to the clone, and/or often mercilessly sending your other selves to a bone-crunching death, will solutions can be attained.
There’s an orb in a room, and you need it to move on that’s the gist. The best puzzle games revolve around taking simple concepts and slowly expanding the ways in which players think about using them to approach solving problems, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a game that does that better than The Swapper. Here are ten games on the Wii U that have best helped me do just that: Sure, running and jumping and flying and shooting can be a fun test of reflexes, but as someone who can’t get enough of crosswords before I go to sleep, sometimes I just want to come home after a long day of work and relax by exercising my brain. While the Wii U’s library isn’t known for its abundance of certain genres, like RPGs or FPSs, one area that Nintendo’s console has represented quite well is the puzzle game.