7 Nanocycles is a demo made by Sweden-based indie developer Nicklas Nygren (aka ‘Nifflas’), and is a deceptively addictive game concept that lobs you in your tiny spaceship through a world of floating geometric shapes.
7 Nanocycles is about keeping momentum while inside the game’s many iridescent blocks, portals which act like temporary fuel cells to your spacecraft. But as soon as you jump from one to the next, you’re left with whatever force you generated, making it easy to incorrectly calculate the angle/speed required to get to the next block and consequently crashing to the Tron-ish world below.
The game’s unique maneuvering concept derives from a number of previous works from Nygren, including its spiritual predecessors Ynglet, a 2013 entry into the No More Sweden game jam centered around a fish-thing that swims from bubbles and cubes, and 7 Light-years, a game made in only 10 hours with his cousin that expands on the momentum-building jumping scheme.
Download ‘7 Nanocycles’
The concept of 7 Nanocycles is fun, and would make for a much more expansive game that could easily incorporate more challenging level design for extended gameplay. For now, the game features 7 levels set to a driving electronic soundtrack that keeps you locked into the task of jumping “like an awesome dolphin spaceship something,” as Nygren puts it.
At times I found myself unsure of where the ground was— especially true in levels that made you fly straight up through one of the many long rectangle blocks. More than once I would end up undershooting a crucial jump because I didn’t know what direction gravity would pull me in. These were thankfully few and far between, so the energetic pace of the game wasn’t disrupted for long.
Hopefully Nygren has found some time after the release of his latest Wii U title Affordable Space Adventures and can now take a deeper dive into VR development.
