TerRover embraces and champions the game design concept of Trial by Death. Trial by Death is the process by which the player acquires knowledge of the game and its systems of control by forging forward without the necessary information to succeed, relying on continuous failure to derive the correct solution. The Trial by Death fad seems to be very hot right now, especially in the independent development community.

You are a TerRover, a cute rectangular chassis with 5 wheels and a head to point in what direction you’d like to go. Your job on each little planet/world is to traverse each level and activate the beacons for other individuals of your species to find and settle. The levels you must traverse are littered with deep pitfalls, rotating spikes, boiling lava and rolling enemies – all in place waiting to bring about your demise. Outside of these external factors, there are also plenty of nooks and crevices you can find yourself wedged into, where the only escape involves self-implosion.

With no true story to speak of, TerRover sticks to the fundamentals – simple controls, easy-to-learn-difficult-to-master game play and ramping difficulty – to draw the player in and keep them in that mesmerized state for hours. This game exudes the feel of an old-school arcade game you could see yourself pumping your quarters into the cabinet. Call it the 2010 version of Moon Patrol.

The controls are simple, but peculiar. The direction your chassis is trying to go is based on where your head is located. There are four positions for your head: on top of the chassis on the left, on top of the chassis to the right and those same two positions underneath the chassis. Obviously, if your head is underneath the chassis, you’re probably not going anywhere very quickly. Being in 2D, you would think that only going right or left would be easy, right? Where the complication begins to compound is in the TerRover’s center of gravity. You see, the developers put an axis through the center of your chassis. Since you can only travel right or left, they tied the axis to the left analog stick. Gently push the stick to the right and your TerRover leans to the right; mash the stick and your TerRover begins to tumble end over end. It gives you a lot of accuracy through the stick sensitivity. This is a double-edged sword for both you and the game/level design. You have pinpoint accuracy with the ability to slowly raise your front tire in order to climb through tight places or survive tricky situations. It makes precision jumping and platforming a reality. Unfortunately, it also means that exaggerated or overcompensated leaning while traveling or jumping can result in one of two results: certain death or completing a task you don’t know how it was that you accomplished it. In Billiards terms, it would be considered “slop.”

So, at times, you feel like a god making these incredible jumps using your skills and at other times you just aren’t sure how you did what you did because you just slopped your way through it. A trial in patience, I found myself spending multiple attempts on trying to do it the right way, followed by several frustrated attempts of simply mashing buttons and the left stick in hopes of just eking out a successful result. It even got to the point where I attempted to slop a situation first rather than try to use the skills I had developed.

That brings us to TerRover’s level design and the game’s inherent problem. There are five different worlds and while there are the typical lava and snow worlds, each world serves its own purpose and teaches its own lessons. For example, the snow levels emphasize timing and the liquid levels emphasize holding self-control over your chassis. These intensified lessons give you the tools, but sometimes leave out key pieces of the instruction manual with the assumption your continuous deaths will fill in the blanks. I never found any instruction or tutorial on the importance of chassis weight or how to properly utilize the magnet attachment. Imagine my surprise when I pulled the metal plate on the ceiling down on top of my head, filling the screen with little balls that took me over 20 minutes to extricate myself from. The look of frustration on my TerRover as he struggles in a ball pit is nothing in comparison to the feelings of rage and frustration I was experiencing.

The biggest offender is the final level. The premise is simple: take all the skills you’ve been taught and employ them all in this final level. That’s perfect - unfortunately, the flip side is…there are no checkpoints, so don’t die. First task is for you to make four perfect jumps through spaces with spiky death above and below. Then, you cross a bouncy conveyor belt with intermittent spiky death and then you drop down and avoid the underside of the belt to cross back – only to then make a return trip underneath and then back across the top side to go back again. All this time, if you die, you start over. That’s just the first five minutes (assuming you haven’t died a bunch). There were two times where I traversed the dangers for 20+ minutes, to the point where I saw the starting point transform into the ending point. Victory was almost within reach. I traversed the underside of the conveyor belt, I only needed to cross the belt on the top side and scale a small mountain. And then I died on the conveyor belt…

I’ll admit it, I couldn’t finish the level. After 200+ deaths on that level, I gave up. It had ceased being fun and it had gone past having determination to finish. The game won. I was emotionally beaten into submission.

TerRover is brilliantly crafted game that is ultimately brutal and punishing. I know there are people who love a grueling precision platformer. The type of people who think Worlds A-D on the original Super Mario Bros. 2 is a fun Sunday afternoon activity. If you find yourself in this demographic, I strongly encourage you to purchase this game. As you probably can tell, I am not in this group, but it shows the quality of the game as to how much I enjoyed it up until the final level. That said, with a $15 price tag, it may be too steep for those who are not looking for a title as intense as TerRover is. You may want to wait and see if the price drops to $10 before picking it up.