It all looks insanely cool, to be honest, each of the 50 levels on offer taking you somewhere new, racing over an empty plain one second, curving around the outside of a tube the next - around the inside of a tube, over a rumpled bedspread of a level, around a half-pipe. There are three modes available, Pure, which forces you to restart from level 1 each time, Classic, which allows you to restart from any level with a banked score and number of shields, and YOLO, in which you don't pick up any new shields at the start of a new level. Certain enemies come in packs and if you blast them to pieces with sufficient accuracy, time slows down, nothing can hurt you and your score multiplier goes briefly through the roof. At times, you can gain a shield of invulnerability for a few moments, which lets you race through all oncoming enemies and any immovable parts of the landscape with impunity. Somewhere along the line, pickups, in the form of brightly coloured pills, come into play too, adding to your weapons and boosting your speed and point-scoring capacity even further. Reach a certain speed and any subsequent gates send a little pulse rippling forwards, destroying everything up ahead for the foreseeable future. A collision with a gate - a collision with anything - reduces your speed but also knocks away one of your shields, and when your shields are gone, the next hit will kill you. You choose where you want to sit on the risk versus reward spectrum. ![]() Simply put, I'm not sure you could hit all the gates if you wanted to, and that's the point. The gates are narrow, and the line that threads them all together is frequently not a very clean one. Your speed is ultimately under your control: racing through those tiny gates, each one jolting you forward a little bit more, is a compulsion, but it is also a risk. One of the pleasures of being in the company of a master like Minter is that he's been thinking about this stuff for quite a while, and so he's entirely unwilling to dictate the way you approach anything in his games. The job, then, is not just to survive, but to survive while pushing yourself to travel as fast as you can. The higher your speed, the higher your scoring potential. The kink here, the point on which the whole thing revolves, is that as you roar into the distance, you have the opportunity to move through neat little gates that boost your speed. You play a little spacecraft forever roaring into the distance, strafing left and right over strange-shaped lands as you blast away at everything that comes at you. But whereas Space Giraffe was a wonderfully complex and technical game in very obvious ways, relying on the correct manipulation of a handful of gloriously elastic showboating systems, Polybius seems to be simplicity itself. Polybius feels like a true heir to Space Giraffe, which is not something anyone should say lightly. A Llamasoft game you can stick your head in! A tiny download - how does all of this fit into 171.8MB, with its peerless frame rate? - it's a wonderfully rich experience. It supports PSVR, as well as normal and 3D-enabled tellies. Named after a brilliant urban legend about an arcade cabinet that did very bad things to its players, Polybius is the first Llamasoft game that you can stick your head in. ![]() Polybius, the latest from Minter's micro-studio Llamasoft, has an obvious selling point. And Jeff Minter, another otherworldly genius if ever there was one, has pretty much carved out a career from conjuring light and movement and a sense of infinity, all of it racing out of the darkness. If I understand the story correctly, Newton once stuck a bodkin in his eye to learn more about them - "betwixt my eye and bone as neare to backside of my eye as I could," if we're after precision, which we probably are if we're exploring the territory in which bodkin meets eyeball. Odd business, really: things that the eyeball decides to see when it has nothing much to look at it lights flickering and fizzing without the obvious involvement of photons. They're such a strange sensation, and such a private, insular one, that it can be quite weird to look them up online and find that they have a name, and that everyone gets them. Phosphenes often look like cosmic checkerboard tunnels, curving and warping into the infinite distance. Phosphenes are those lights you see if you press your fingers against your eyeballs for a few seconds.
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