I am delighted to introduce Indie Game Love Letters, a regularly-updated series of posts spotlighting – as you can probably infer from the title – some of my favourite indie games. Star of the inaugural edition is 2015’s Downwell.

I first heard about Downwell in the latter half of 2015, during an episode of Idle Thumbs that featured those involved waxing lyrical about the game and its apparent merits. Although their praise was enough to pique my curiosity somewhat, I went no further than performing some cursory online research; Downwell soon vanished from my consciousness and would not resurface until the very end of 2015, when it was shared to my Facebook page by a friend who thought it was the sort of thing I’d enjoy. To their credit, it was not an unfounded recommendation. I’ve long been a proponent of the idea that indie games are where the industry’s most interesting content resides, and I’ve been a lover of platform games ever since Sonic 2 on the Megadrive way back when. This time, I decided to give it a try.

Conceived, designed, and programmed by Japanese developer Ojiro Fumoto, the game was published by Devolver Digital and landed on Windows and iOS in October 2015. The positive critical reception led to an Android release in late January of this year, and Sony have since announced that console versions – for both the PS4 and the PlayStation Vita – will follow before the end of 2016. A down-scrolling vertical platformer, the game (perhaps unsurprisingly given its title) sees you tumbling down a well blasting enemies out of the way with the gunboots on your feet. There are four distinct areas within the well followed by a final boss, and a series of side rooms with varying contents add further variety to proceedings.

Looking at it superficially, it’s fairly easy to view Downwell as something of a coming together of two of indie gaming’s more well-known ambassadors, Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac. It fits the mould of ‘procedurally-generated rogue-lite’ to a tee, blending Isaac‘s power-ups and emphasis on ranged combat with Spelunky‘s treasure collecting and necessity for precision movement to create a final product that manages to completely sidestep the pitfall of executing its premise in a derivative fashion. Put simply Downwell was an absolute joy to play, and this is thanks in no small part to something absent from its spiritual bigger brothers: a combo system that is utterly brilliant in its simplicity.

In the world of Downwell ammunition is not a finite resource, but your gunboots must nonetheless be reloaded once all of the rounds have been fired off. Rather than simply tapping a button, reloading is accomplished by landing on one of the platforms that litter the well shaft, but in an incredibly clever move the game also allows reloading after bouncing off of an enemy. When this is combined with a level-end power-up that lets you reload by collecting gems, the game becomes an intense reflex test that challenges the player to chain ridiculous kill combos spanning between levels. It’s an incredibly compelling mechanic that opens up an entirely different way of playing, and a great deal of the 29 hours that Steam says I’ve spent with this game saw me sat completely focused, in pursuit of bigger and bigger combos. The end result was a reawakening of the kind of dormant perfectionism that saw me hit reset if I was unable to fully combo the game’s opening level. Spelunky evoked a similarly automated response to perceived failure in its opening stages, and I’ve long considered this kind of effect as characteristic of a successful rogue-lite. Fail, pause, reset, repeat.

The execution is only part of what makes this such an essential addition to any collection though; it would be remiss of me to praise Downwell without drawing attention to the way in which it presents itself. Indeed, the overall aesthetic was a significant contributor to my overall enjoyment of this game. The throwback look is a popular one amongst indies, and when executed well – as in Shovel Knight, VVVVVV, or Risk of Rain – can generate considerable appeal by infusing the modern mechanics afforded by advances in developmental technology with the look and feel of a time when games were simpler. In an environment where more or less anyone can put a game out there, indies can live or die by their art and music; Spelunky was a winner for me with its blockbuster Indiana Jones approach to design whilst The Binding Of Isaac’s gross edgy dudebro take on Christianity was a big part of why I didn’t spend as much time with it as I did with some of its genre contemporaries. Downwell goes the hyper minimalistic route and succeeds in no small part due to the wide variety of unlockable colour palettes on offer, and one modelled explicitly after the original Gameboy is, I feel, especially deserving of praise here.

Downwell succeeds where others might falter because everything is set at just the right level. The difficulty is such that beating both its levels and final boss feels like a genuine victory (it certainly did to me) without ever falling into the kind of Nintendo Hard territory that makes failure feel cheap and out of your control. There are enough power-ups – both within the levels and at their conclusion – to add variety and open up new styles of play, but not so many that it reaches the kind of egregiously high level present in The Binding Of Isaac. All of this is packaged in an understated art style well-served by the selection of unlockable palettes, complemented by an appropriately chiptuney soundtrack (composed by Eirik Suhrke) and delivered – regardless of platform – at less than £2.50. I have absolutely zero hesitation in recommending this, and at present am struggling to think of a finer candidate for the first edition of IGLL.

Downwell is available from the Steam store, Apple’s App Store and Google Play.