With recent titles such as The Escapists, Light and Flockers, Team 17 seem to be doing all they can to provide unique and charming titles both as part of their own arsenal and their indie development scheme. While we have been treated to puzzle, stealth and role-playing games, Team 17 have yet to play a part in a platformer recently and that’s where italicpig comes in with their new release Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark. While platforming is crucial in the game, the puzzle elements featured in the game are quirky and very well thought out.

Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark is definitely not a story driven game by any stretch of the imagination, but the background story sees Schrödinger’s theory of a cat being both dead and alive come true as our feline hero is thrust into a particle filled dimension, where a combination of particles can result in dynamic powers and abilities. Although the world in which our hero now finds himself in, is a strange and random place, there is a dark presence waiting to pounce as it looks to bring down the cat and everything else into this dimension.

While there aren’t interactive puzzles, as such, to complete a level, you are provided with combinations of Quarks who come in a variety of colours and offer different powers to progress through obstacles. To begin with, the game does guide you through the basic abilities that you can use when you collect certain Quarks, such as yellow providing you with the ability to fly, blue allowing you to destroy ground beneath you, green will allow you to briefly travel through green goo and red Quarks give you the ability to create your own platform in mid-air.

Each ability requires three Quarks and you are required to mix the small creatures together and offer abilities such as a trampoline, parachute, trap and bomb to name but a few. You collect the Quarks throughout the level and, more often than not, the levels will force you to stop and ponder what your next step will be in order to progress. While they do vary the gameplay and require a lot of thought, if you make a mistake then you will have to return to the last checkpoint as you can’t reuse the Quarks. In my time playing the game, I was restarting at the previous checkpoints a lot. While my experience of Schrödinger’s Cat was several attempts of trial and error, there is a lot of platforming to be had in this game as well as combining puzzles.

One of the first things I did when I booted up Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark was to connect my Xbox 360 controller, as I prefer to use the controller as it allows for more control. Alas my attempts were futile as the game doesn’t have controller support, which is inconvenient for those who prefer to have inch precision control over their jumps. The controls see you using both the PC gamers favourite and least favourite control methods with movement being dictated with ‘W, A, S & D’ and the ‘up, down, left & right’ keys are what you use to combine the Quarks. As I’ve found with other platformers, using the keyboard for jumping and changing momentum in mid-air can be tricky and this seems to fall into the same trap.

The jumping seems very stop-start, rather than free-flowing from level-to-level and this is one of my major flaws with the game. While combining the Quarks which work really well and often have you wondering which you should use next, though the platforming feels very sluggish. Compared to a game such as Rayman Legends, Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark feels as though the flow is interrupted too often, but this may be down to the lack of controller support. While this is one of my main gripes, unfortunately it isn’t the only one.

The environment throws up various obstacles which you have to use your special abilities and creative mind to overcome and while this is all well and good, there are no landmark sections of the environments where you can say you have been before. While you are tasked with reaching certain characters throughout the map, you tend to stumble onto them by chance. There have been numerous times where I ended up going in a circle because you aren’t told where to go and although you can pan out for a slightly wider view by using the tab button, there is no way to see where you are meant to be going. I often found myself creating ways to reach new parts of the level which I could not interact with. Our feline hero is pretty skinny, smaller than some of the gaps in the game, but yet he still can’t fit down some of the gaps which is a bit jarring. While there is a tiny amount of combat that you can utilise by pressing ‘E’, there isn’t a huge amount of it and is feels quite disconnected compared to the rest of the game.

Aside from these hiccups, the voice acting is performed brilliantly with some funny moments. While there are no stand-out voice actors, they all do a great job in delivering comedic conversations. However, while the comedy is all very good and the actors do a great job, the dialogue isn’t too interesting and aside from the funny moments, the story-telling element of the game is rather dull and definitely not one of the game’s stronger points.

As an intriguing puzzle and thought-provoking experience, Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark makes you think a lot and provides a sense of achievement when you have managed to complete a tricky section. As positive as these aspects are, the platforming should be the main aspect of this game and it’s very lacklustre. The best platformers should feel very smooth and slick, but the constant stop-start nature of Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark hinders the game rather than build on its initial solid ideas, which is a dam shame.

Schrödinger’s Cat and The Raiders of The Lost Quark is available via Steam on September 23^rd.

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