Only Toby can save his friends...
When you start playing Toby: The Secret Mine you might encounter a sense of deja-vu. After the massive success of Limbo, Badlands and Inside, with their atmospheric style of near darkness and silhouette, its template seems to have become popular with puzzle platformers at the moment. Toby: The Secret Mine is no cheap copy however but definitely forms its own identity within this sub-genre of puzzle platformer.
You play the title character Toby who lives in a peaceful village in the mountains where the residents keep being kidnapped. Little Toby decides to attempt a rescue his friends and heads off into the dark forest to find them. The foregrounds in the game are all in dark silhouette apart from the glow of the characters eyes, and are beautifully lit by the stunning artistic backgrounds which create the sense of heading into a dangerous environment. The dangers you face are a mix of hidden traps, monsters and dangerous machinery all primed to kill poor Toby, so expect to die many times as you solve the problems and figure out your way through each level. The puzzles are a mix of the standard fare of moving blocks and pulling levers in the right order, mixed with some puzzles involving getting shapes in the right order to unlock it. As you go through each level its not enough to just get to the to the other end but you have to rescue your friends from the hanging cages they’ve been imprisoned in. Every now and again you’ll catch up to the evil kidnappers who might throw bombs or shoot arrows at you before making it off on their heels, thus giving you and extra danger to avoid.
Each level is quite short, and they start off pretty easy but progress nicely in difficulty. Autosave points are fairly frequent so when you die you don’t have to redo too much off the level which avoids the frustration you get in many games in having to play the same parts over and over again. A unique mechanic in the game is that some parts of the level are hidden in darkness, so if you think a part is near on impossible to traverse, you’ll find a hidden path or tunnel hidden in the darkness that will only be revealed when you walk right up to it. The darkness of each level makes it feel claustrophobic and just when you think you could do with a break from it, the games switches to the polar opposite for a couple of levels as Toby steps out into the snow. The abundance of brilliant white evokes the whiteout of a blizzard so well that you end up relieved when Toby can get back underground and into the dark!
One criticism of the game is that it’s a little on the short side and even with a lot of dying an replaying little bits most gamers should reach the end in just under 3 hours. The very tricky final level drags this out a little and there is the replay value of going back to find any of your friends that you missed the first time through, but I was hoping for a little more for the price. If you enjoy this kind of puzzle platformer this game is still well worth picking up, with its beautiful graphical style and sound make it a cut above the norm. The developers at Lukas Navratil Games have paced the game nicely, and if at first glance it looks like a rip-off of Limbo you soon realise that Toby: The Secret Mine is more than that and has its own identity.
Huge Thanks to Headup Games for the review copy.
Game: Toby: The Secret Mine
Developer: Lukas Navratil Games
Publisher: Headup Games
Genre: Puzzle Platformer
Price: £7.99