J.A.R.E.D

LIT BY THE LIGHT ITSELF

J.A.R.E.D looks old school but the lighting is not. Every lamp, laser, lava pool and electrified barrier really lights the room it is in - the game runs a real-time global illumination solve (radiance cascades, for the curious) so light bounces round corners, pools on the floor and bleeds colour onto the walls.

It is why the facility feels the way it does: a dark corridor is dark because nothing in it is giving off light, and the first glow you see down a shaft really is the way forward.

LASERS, MIRRORS & A HALF-MOON SHIELD

Laser beams sweep the lower levels. Push a mirror crate into one and you can bend it round a room - onto a receiver, through a wall of ice it melts on the way, or straight back at the turret that fired it.

Jared also gets a shield: a half moon of shimmering heat haze. Hold it up to a laser and the beam glances off its curve, so the angle you meet it at is the angle it leaves. There is a whole family of puzzles hiding in that one curve.

• sticky glue tiles that hold whatever touches them - walls and ceilings included
• crumbling floors and drillable rock
• TNT, saw blades and live electric conduits
• sparks that run along wires and power the doors they reach

A GAME INSIDE THE GAME NEW!

Hey! Pick up the token!

Tucked away in the levels are bonus tokens. Grab one and the world around you changes era - the level plays again as if it were an 80s 8-bit or a 90s 16-bit console game, CRT glow and all.

Some tokens go further and drop you into a full arcade mini game: a Hang-On style motorbike racer, an Asteroids-style rock shooter and a Thrust-style cave flyer. They are built the honest way - pixel art drawn in code, and the sound made by software copies of the old sound chips (a Master System's PSG, a C64's SID). No samples, nothing the real hardware could not have done.

Beat one and it unlocks as a Challenge on the main menu, with a target to hit and a Steam leaderboard to climb.

THE DEEPER YOU GO...

J.A.R.E.D does not start out with much. Upgrade stations further down the facility install new abilities - and every new one changes how the old rooms read. The deeper the mystery, the stronger you become.

And somewhere down there is a level that is not playing fair with you at all. We will say no more than what the speaker at its door says: "the scary way is the safe way."

MADE BY TWO TINY STUDIOS

J.A.R.E.D is made by RiddlerSoft Games and MindJar - two small studios who love games - on our own home-grown engine. Our playtesters' runs are recorded and replayed level by level, so when you find the room that made you swear, we get to watch it too and fix it.

If you like the look of it, the single most useful thing you can do is wishlist it on Steam. Then grab the demo and tell us what you think!