It's not much of a life as an N++ ninja. Temporally speaking, as much as anything. A lack of height and surplus of speed has resulted in a bluebottle-like metabolism: your life expectancy is just 90 seconds. And that minute and a half is pretty grueling stuff. You can't afford to spare any microseconds on appreciating the finer things in life, luxuriating in a warm ninja bath, for example, or absentmindedly dipping a shuriken in a '47 Cheval Blanc. Nope, you have but one heroically single-minded ambition: "the need," as the game puts it, "to traverse a series of five rooms before the end of your lifetime." It's not all bad news though. Each of these rooms contains a glitter cannon spattering of gold pieces, every one of which increases your lifespan by two seconds - about 20 months in civilian years.
These rooms are, nevertheless, sparse and perilous. Each one has an exit door which must be unlocked by first finding and hitting its corresponding switch - usually located on the far side of the room, beyond some fearsome gauntlet. Obstacles come in various guises - spiked cogs, turrets that fire homing missiles, wibble-wobbling laser fields - and all kill instantly on touch. You have no tools at your disposal, apart from your raw athleticism: you can run, jump and use walls to slow your fall by sliding down to the ground. You must always be mindful of gravity: falls must be broken by landing first on a yielding slope; crash on flat ground from too great a distance and you'll tumble into a game over screen, all before you've had the chance to make much of your short yet noble life. Around this enviably small palette of interactions Metanet Software constructs a vast array of challenge rooms - more than 2000 in total, grouped into five-room sequences known as 'episodes'. For a game in which there's not much going on, there's an awful lot going on.
It's a game about spatial reasoning, but also about momentum. You soon learn that you accelerate more quickly on the ground than in the air (slightly contrary to expectation), and that vertical momentum accumulates. Wall jumping increases your upward momentum, as does running up an angled surface. Once you're through the first glut of episodes designed to teach and reinforce the basics, the majority of the more challenging stages involve the precision building and use of momentum, as you dash across tiny stretches of safe ground, leaping into the air and making micro-adjustments to your trajectory in order to land precisely where needed. There's a great deal more finesse than, say, Super Meat Boy, principally due to the subtle ways in which momentum is used to create challenge.
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