There’s now been plenty of games which have you controlling two characters at once, but it’s not Orul‘s most apparent feature which makes it stand out. It’s the option to change the color palette.
That’s not to take away from Orul‘s puzzle-platformer experience, nor from the exceptionally fun, upbeat soundtrack. Its just that it’s such a simple extra feature, but yet it feels like it adds a lot to the game.
Orul‘s puzzles are straightforward in nature. One character walks on the top half of the screen, feet downward toward the other character. The other does the same, mirrored. Some objects exist in one world but not the other – you need to take this information onboard and avoid the bad and achieve the good. But, it’s when I start losing that the palette-swapping feature really comes into its own.
When I play masocore platformers – ultra-tough, unforgiving platformers which require a lot of accuracy to survive – I don’t react well to continued failure and start moving to power the game down. Titles like Cloudberry Kingdom had modes which were perfect for my succeed-fail-abort adaptation, however most lack this, or indeed some other way to escape the loop of death.
Adding in some other distraction, even as simple as a palette swap, is a great little addition which gives me something else to do rather than abort. Is that silly? Probably a little bit. However, when I fail to make a jump and I teeter on that line of being frustrated and about to give up, I can just hammer the palette-shifting button and pretend that I wasn’t very good because of the color of the level.
Orul is playable now on itch.io.
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