Mo Astray - SWITCH HIDDEN GEM - Puzzle Platforming Perfection

Mo Astray Review: I recently discovered Mo Astray, a Puzzle Platforming hidden gem that's been out on Nintendo Switch and PC (Steam) since 2019. To my delight, this game is awesome and I wanted to share it with you. This is a true hidden gem and it's affordable too, so if you like exploring, solving puzzles, and fighting awesome bosses, definitely check out Mo Astray.

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In Mo Astray, you explore an abandoned research facility on a far off planet and your adventure is broken up into just over two dozen levels which you’ll play through one after another. In other words, a Metroidvania this is not. Graphically, Mo Astray looks about as beautiful as you could expect from a pixel art game. Foregrounds and backgrounds look great thanks to the attention to detail. Animations are expressive, and environments range from full-on techno sci-fi to abandoned ruins that look like they haven’t been visited for centuries, and they all make you feel as if you’re lost deep within a grimey, gross and deadly space craft.

But what about gameplay? Well, outside the boss battles and some sequences during the late game, Mo Astray puts a much heavier emphasis on the puzzles and the platforming than the action. You play as a nebulous blob of blue sticky goo with no arms and no legs. As such, traditional combat is pretty infrequent. With no weapons of any sort, you instead have a jump maneuver and a dash and the dash. Now the dash lets you pause in mid air, giving you a couple of seconds to aim your next move, and it lets you hurl yourself at bad guys. And most enemies you do encounter take the form of slow and lumbering zombies. Nothing too tough. That said, the way both the jumping and dashing mechanics require you to aim can take some getting used to.

However, that won’t take long because this same point and jump mechanic acts as your main method of navigation. Not only will it help you jump from platform to platform, but it also lets you stick to just about any surface. This allows for some serious verticality, and some fun puzzles. You’ll frequently jump from wall to wall in order to push high up switches and reach far off levers. In fact, one of the main reasons Mo Astray impressed me so much is that despite a core mechanic that’s relatively basic, the puzzles never felt familiar. Even when I was just pushing blocks and jumping around, the puzzles always felt fresh and entertaining. In other words, hats off to the level designers.

Now, you will discover new abilities as you advance through the levels. One lets you spawn a clone of yourself and another let’s you temporarily fly around. And the later levels keep pace with head scratchers and platforming challenges that require you to get even more creative. You might have to say, leap to a hanging weight attached to a pulley, causing it to lower and distant platform to rise. And to get to that platform, you might have to navigate a web of lethal laser beams, or soar through a wind tunnel without getting blown into a wall of spikes. The key here is that, even with just a handful of abilities, puzzles remained varied and challenging, but because you’re never overwhelmed with a slew of tricky mechanics, puzzles never felt too complicated or frustrating.

Plus, no single puzzle, at least that I can remember, takes up more than one screen at a time. These aren’t huge, overwhelming contraptions. Just fun and rewarding, bite-sized challenges. Plus, checkpoints are very frequent, so while you might die frequently on a tougher platforming challenge, you’ll always respawn nearby. And speaking of platforming, know that Mo Astray’s controls are great, particularly after you get used to the unusual jumping mechanic.

Now, if you’re worried that this game is literally nothing but platforming and puzzles, there is more to this game. First, is a series of collectibles. As a completionist, seeking these out was a nice diversion, and after finishing the game I was able to revisit levels to find them all. Second, the later levels mixed things up with a few action packed segments that picked up the pace of the game. One in particular introduced an entirely new type of gameplay in a cinematic, explosion heavy segment that felt like an all out action movie.

And speaking of cinematic, let’s finally talk about the game’s bosses which impressed me far beyond my expectations. Similar to the Mo Astray’s puzzles, destroying the game’s half dozen or so bosses required me to make creative use of my abilities. Again, no guns, no bombs. Just a jump and a dash. One of my favorite bosses required me to time my jumps in order to land on rotating platforms one at a time. Meanwhile I had to simultaneously memorize the bosses' attack patterns as the entire stage moved and rotated around me. Once I had the patterns down, I absolutely dominated. This might sound weird, but boss battles like this actually reminded me a bit of Metroid Dread.