Gish

Gish is based on an original idea: you are a ball of tar and you must make use of the physical properties of tar, such as stickiness, to make your way through several typical platform game levels. There are some "puzzles" in the game, but it mostly amounts to moving small blocks on top of pressure plates to open doors. Mainly this is a jumping, climbing, pushing and pulling game, that requires you to use the different tar ball skills, often requiring rather precise timing, to jump between platforms, move objects, etc. Unfortunately the game seems like it was designed to be frustrating. First of all the controls are very hard to learn. Perhaps more importantly it is very easy to die. Most of the time you you die from something that kills you almost instantly such as falling into lava or being crushed under a boulder. This makes When you die you have to restart from the beginning of the level and when you lose all your lives you have to restart from even further back unless you play on the easiest difficulty level. Given how easy it is to die this means a lot of replaying the same levels over and over again. Quite often you have to jump or do something else at a very precise moment or you end up in a state where the current level becomes unwinnable which is in practice equivalent to dying. This makes the game even more frustrating. Even worse, at the very end of the game, if you make a mistake in the last moment you get the bad ending and you have to replay the entire game to get the good ending, even if you are playing on the easiest difficulty level! In addition, the graphics are dull, there is very little visual detail to the levels. The music is fairly good though. This is probably the best aspect of the game. Some hardcore platform game enthusiasts may perhaps enjoy the game but I would not recommend it to anyone else.