Just once, you think they’d make a game about astronauts that gave the poor guys and gals a break. Wait a minute, what do we have here? Irrupt? A game where all you do is walk an endless crew of astronauts from one part of a ship – through open space – to the other? That sounds extremely pleasant. You know, maybe I misju–wait, what are all these falling shapes? And…oh my…they’re destroying the astronauts! You’re sick, Irrupt. You’re sick.
Just once, you think they’d make a game about astronauts that gave the poor guys and gals a break. Wait a minute, what do we have here? Irrupt? A game where all you do is walk an endless crew of astronauts from one part of a ship – through open space – to the other? That sounds extremely pleasant. You know, maybe I misju–wait, what are all these falling shapes? And…oh my…they’re destroying the astronauts! You’re sick, Irrupt. You’re sick.
Created by the deceptively friendly independent developer Sets and Settings (seriously, don’t let their adorable website header fool you!), Irrupt started life as a game where players control a “lil’ ninja…jumping to reach an exit.” Discontent with the layout, however, developer Folmer Kelly (real name “I hate astronauts!”) began “rotating the thing around.” Soon enough, what began as an epic climb to the top turned into a game of avoiding obstacles as they hurled through the middle of the screen. To quote Kelly, “it clicked immediately…this is an iOS game, this is something that you have to hold in your hand to interact with. It was obvious!”
The rest, as they say, is blood-soaked history filled with the cast aside bodies of fallen space heroes. Then again, perhaps, not, if you can intervene! In Irrupt, it’s not an extra supply of oxygen but carefully timed taps that mean the difference between success and failure, as players hold down on the screen to stop the constant flow of characters from one side of the screen to the other. In true arcade fashion, block configurations get more dense and play faster as time goes on. Think of it as a brutal clash between an endless runner and Tetris filtered through the lens of 70s sci-fi and pixel art.
If you’re not too busy weeping as you watch Apollo 13, then you can likely pick up Irrupt from the App Store next week, on October 4th! We definitely will be; and we promise we won’t let our moral objections color our opinion of what looks like an exciting game. Maybe.
