‘Dreamcake Rescue’ Impressions: Rescue Your Boyfriend With the Power of Nodes

Here’s a nice twist on the old ‘damsel in distress’ for ya – this time it’s the guy who needs to be rescued! With a blends of an incredibly stylish pixel art style and the power of music, there’s platforming to be done and a boyfriend to rescue. Time to test your ability to solve puzzles, using your ears too, for once.

I’m telling ya, the gems one can find with a bit of digging amongst free indie games never ceases to amaze me, even those created within a limited timeframe (ie. Ludum Dare/MiniLD). It’s a simple affair, or at least it starts out that way, by teaching you the ropes in a tutorial lasting all of… well, 30 seconds! Or maybe even less, depending on how quickly you get through the first level: A and D is used to move left and right, W to jump and E either picks up a repeater or belches out a high-pitched sound, based on the situation. Yay, no lengthy boring tutorial!

Each time you make a sound, it’ll carry a certain distance and – provided there’s a repeater within range – turn it into one of several different nodes. These need to be placed above the exit to each level in a certain order, before the door will open, allowing you to access the next one. Easy at first, but as more and more nodes are introduced, some of which you’ll have to shuffle around quite a bit, things start getting complicated. A little quick thinking and reorganizing of the repeaters will get the job done in no time though. Just wish that E wasn’t used to both make a sound and pick up a repeater, as it often lead to doing the opposite of what I intended.

Aside from that minor quirk, Dreamcake Rescue seems like a very lovely and unique musical platforming puzzler, and one I would definitely recommend grabbing right now, from its MiniLD #43 page.