Grade: D-
A trippy obstacle course game that bends reality.
Spacehole 2018 is an obstacle course game that feels like traveling through the inside of an optical illusion. You start by flying around in a space shuttle that leaves a rainbow exhaust trail. Soon, you graduate to rolling through an obstacle course inside of a marble. You can take many different warp paths, and you can keep track of your progress from map to map.
When you boot up Spacehole 2018, the first message is a warning not to play if you can have seizures from flashing lights and colors. The developer took the trippy, neon, flashing lights environment concept and turned it up to 11. For me, it was just too much. I found myself needing to look away from the screen and blinking my eyes every few minutes.
Gameplay difficulties
In addition to the general trouble I had with the ambiance, I had issues in the game itself. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being lost in the 3D space puzzles. Maybe that was the point, and the challenge was to overcome the sensory disorientation to solve the obstacle. This challenge didn’t end up being enjoyable for me, though.
I started to figure things out but hit a snag that had me hang up the game. I was a spaceship (but like the decommissioned space shuttle kind), and I had rainbow exhaust coming out of my engine, and I was flying around, and I was supposed to go in a marble where I could teleport between realms in marbleized form, and I was chasing a shooting star, and I had to go into cubes that looked like warp coils, and I couldn’t get into them because I kept falling through the void….I’ll stop there.
How you feel reading that run-on sentence is probably close to how I felt playing this game.
Lastly, my only other concern with the game was the installation files. Spacehole 2018 had two .zip files to download and then put in the run directory, which was a clunky way to install the game. This install method didn’t work with the itch.io desktop app, and I had to download the game files directly instead of installing and running through the itch app.
The creator of Spacehole2018 had a clear vision for what they wanted to do with this game, and they executed their idea well. For me as a player, though, it didn’t line up with an enjoyable game experience.
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