Alt+Escape: Specter Spelunker Shrinks

Welcome to Alt+Escape, our weekly pick of browser-based games to help you start your weekend a little early. Check back each Friday for a new game!

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Specter Spelunker Shrinks

You know that one song, “White Rabbit,” where the lady sings “One pill makes you larger / and one pill makes you small“? Specter Spelunker Shrinks is pretty much like that, only substitute “button” for “pill” and “Unity-based webgame” for “Lewis Carroll-inspired psychedelic freak-out.”

Specter Spelunker Shrinks‘ gimmick is pretty simple at first: You can change your character’s size by hitting the up and down arrow keys, allowing you to fit through narrow corridors or leap to high up ledges with ease. This isn’t like Mario eating a power mushroom, either: You can go from being almost infinitesimally tiny to gargantuan just by holding the button for a few seconds. The blocky graphics don’t really give you a sense of scale to work with, unfortunately, but I’m guessing constantly resizing curved objects would take this game out of browser territory and into something a lot more CPU intensive.

There’s more to the game than simply squeezing through tight spaces and bounding from one ledge to the next, though; Specter Spelunker Shrinks‘ temporality changes with the size of your character. In other words, objects move more slowly the smaller you are, and vice versa. Throw in iridescent red blocks that send you back to the last checkpoint, and the game’s platforming actually becomes relatively challenging. Still, it’d be interesting to experience this game mechanic with a bit better presentation, or at the very least, less repetitive music. Jefferson Airplane, perhaps?

Source: IndieGames.com – The Weblog