For all intents and purposes I’m on vacation, so I’m going to make this quick. One Step Back is a puzzle game that pits you against yourself. It’s kind of like the Bizarro Cursor*10. The trick is to spend a requisite amount of time moving about in a room without touching clones of yourself that follow your footsteps.
By the time I reached the final exit of that bastard of a last level, I was feeling good about my puzzle-game-defeating abilities. Only to find out that the game was half over. Now I had to do everything backwards. Working my way back from the exit to the entrance making sure I touch every past incarnation of myself. After struggling with avoiding myself for the majority of the game, I assumed this would be a snap. Of course, it’s not. But it’s fun.
The antennae that project from my clones, indicating the direction of their travel, are ingenious devices. They are both righteously helpful and inescapably frightening. The number of times I saw impact approaching without any recourse are quite possibly in the triple digits. That is to say, you’ll die a lot. The glitchy wall-jumping mechanic is the game’s main weak point.
But you should click here to play One Step Back, regardless.
This article appears in August 13 • 2010.
