Beneath the Lighthouse
Platform: iOS, Android
Always looking for the lighthouse to give him peace, our little hero is distraught one night to find the peaceful wave of light is gone. Then the next night shares the same darkness. Not only is his a death sentence to the ships sailing at night, but the one who is supposed to keep the lighthouse running is his beloved grandfather. Sailing out to the island, our hero finds two things... his grandfather's hat and a deep hole in the ground which he promptly falls into. When your head is bigger than your body and more round than a bowling ball, there's more use to it than just making you look adorable, and soon our hero is rolling around trying to find what is Beneath the Lighthouse. This new puzzle platform game from Nitrome, free for iOS and Android, has you spinning the room to keep this fighter rolling around, dodging spikes and falling deeper and deeper into this unknown cliff that is the lighthouse's home.
Drag the screen in circles to turn it and the screen will rotate accordingly while our hero rolls along the scenery, hopefully avoiding any dangers. As you spin the room, you affect everything in it, so be careful how fast or how much you turn. Each section is divided into three areas and you have three lives. When you run out of lives, you have a choice of starting all the way over again in the first section, or choosing between sharing info about the game or watching a short commercial to start in the room you died in. There is an option to pay less than $5.00USD to get unlimited lives and eliminate all the ads, which consist of a small pop up that comes every 25 deaths or so. It's not that big of a deal if you don't ever upgrade, but if you have some extra cash it's nice to have the option. Being a Nitrome game, the difficulty is pretty high, and so you'll die a lot as you're trying to roll into the pipe for the next area, or move the boxes full of crabs out of pinching range, or keep the mines from crashing into our hero or..... Yeah, there are a lot of clever devices in this game, and they come at just the right pace to keep you sucked right in. When you think they're going to have to start repeating, they prove you wrong with another creative twist level after level. With its creativity, cuteness and challenging levels, this is another home rune for the Nitrome family.
Beneath the Lighthouse (iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch)
Beneath the Lighthouse (Android, Android Tablet)
Finally beat it on iOS a few days ago but I didn't get the All Trophies achievement. A double check did reveal a level I missed but I still don't have it after redoing it. Anyone else with the problem?
Also trying to contact Nitrome and waiting for response.
It seems odd to me that Nitrome would keep the gameplay of one of their older games (Roly Poly) but change the main character and setting. I don't think they usually do that.
It's good, but to be completely honest, I wouldn't exactly call it Nitrome's best game of 2015. While it is quite clever and varied in design, and the art and audio complement each other well, its bugs and lack of polish are as bad as this game is great. The multiple crashing issues between cutscenes, laggy levels, an annoying respawn bug that still has not been fixed with the latest update...I don't know; I feel like this needed more polish, or testers. The game also seems to be more suited to iPads; it feels a little contrived on an iPod touch 5th gen (alongside the fact that if you're not careful, your finger will obstruct your view of the game screen, though this isn't really a major complaint on my part.
I liked Roly Poly when I played it, but I felt like that game could have been more polished, and that Nitrome could have done more with the concept. So Beneath the Lighthouse kind of makes up for half that Roly Poly wasn't (doing more with the concept). It's nice to have some awesome levels (like the last level) and ones that play around with autoturning and things that behave when you're turning the wheel.
Overall, I enjoyed Beneath the Lighthouse despite these issues, but I wouldn't recommend it to other people in its current state. Imo, Green Ninja is probably their best overall composed and well performing game this year. /unpopular opinion
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