Robo Rescue

Robo Rescue is a puzzle platformer set in a robotics lab that looks like a Saturday morning: white and mint panels with rounded corners, coloured cable runs along the walls, glass tubes bubbling in the background and soft shadows under everything. You play a round little robot on treads with a screen for a face. It grins while it rolls, goes cross-eyed the moment gravity turns over, pulls a worried face on the way down a long drop, and puts a question mark up when you leave it standing still too long. In each of the twenty-four rooms one of its friends is asleep in a glass pod, and reaching the pod is the whole job.

The robot runs, jumps with a few frames of coyote time and a jump buffer, holds the jump button to hover down slowly for a second, and grabs a crate to push or pull it a cell at a time. The button that changes everything is the flip: tap it and the room's gravity turns over for you and for any loose crate, but not for the machinery. A crate wedged under a ledge stays exactly where it is while everything else falls to the ceiling, and that difference is the answer to more than one room. Falling into the void or touching a laser puts the room straight back the way it started, with no lives to lose and nothing to grind.

The four wings introduce one idea each and then mix them. Assembly teaches the flip, crates, pressure plates and doors. Cold Storage adds ice floors with almost no grip, conveyor belts and the yellow switch that reverses every belt in the room. Power Core brings humming blue energy fields that only drop while a circuit is live, and magnet crane pads that reel you or a crate up through a shaft. Launch Bay finishes with teleporter rings, timed doors on a five-second clock, and a laser you redirect by dropping a mirror crate into the beam. Each room counts your moves against a par and hands out three stars: one for waking the buddy, one for the bolt tucked somewhere off the obvious route, and one for coming in at or under par. A hint button appears if a room has kept you for a minute, and your stars are kept in your browser.