TorqueL
Bundle: Racial Justice

Genre: Physics platformer

Sabe’s rating: ⭐

Just when you think the well is dry for action-puzzle-platform gimmickery, a game like this shows up. In TorqueL, you pilot a square in 2D space. You can roll it from side to side, or extrude colored beams from any of its four faces to push off of surfaces. You know Katamari Damacy, and how the rolling ball ends up in a kind of pole-vaulting mode if you get an oversized object stuck to one side? TorqueL maps that feeling to two dimensions, and makes it the core mechanic.

It’s very difficult to get the hang of, since at any given moment, pressing “A” might push a leg out in literally any direction based on the current rotation of your li'l cube. It’s gratifying when you pull off a trick or find a rhythm and clear a stage, to be sure! But whenever you hit a hazard, you start the level over, and it replays the camera pan showing you the stage’s layout. You can sort of speed it up, but it’s completely unnecessary, and adds impatient insult to frustrating injury. If the developer added an instant restart option, making it play more like a Meat Boy, I’d give this another try.