Steel Defier

Listen to this post:

There was a time once when game discussion revolved around, well, games. We’re talking about gameplay, controls, that sort of thing; it’s a little more rare these days, since the focus tends to be on whatever cultural monomania has gripped the Internet that week. It’s not surprising that we’ve lost a little nuance on the gameplay side of things as the result of this, which can even include precisely how much game you’re getting when you make your purchase.

Let’s buck that trend: today we’re talking about Steel Defier, a game about jumping and collecting keycards that’s twenty minutes long.

via YouTube

You’re a prisoner in a ship in space. There’s some sort of malfunction or accident and your cell opens up, allowing you to start looking for an escape route. It’s not too far away, but unfortunately there’s plenty of security systems in the form of, er, deadly moving blocks on the way over. You’ll have to run, jump and collect dozens of keycards in order to make your way to freedom.

That’s pretty much it! Steel Defier is basically a series of rooms featuring moving blocks you’ll have to jump over while grabbing keycards. Grab fifteen in a room and you can move on; complete enough rooms and you’ll finish the game. There’s upgrades here and there that mostly tend to make the experience a little too easy, like an absolutely busted time-slowing ability, but you probably won’t need to use them extensively to make it to the end.

Once you’ve finished the game, you can then play a survival mode with an endlessly spawning set of blocks and keycards that’ll run as long as you like. Collect some keycards in there, get your achievement for doing so, and you’ll have your 100% in half an hour or less.

The graphical style is neat, I suppose, and the experience isn’t bad for what it is. But the question is whether or not you feel like $5 is worth twenty minutes of entertainment. It might be, especially if you’re into classic 1980s puzzle solvers. If so, have at it. If not, you can safely skip Steel Defier knowing you’ve spared yourself a quarter-hour of the ever-evaporating remaining minutes of your life.