Few players relish the thought of escort missions nowadays, but there was a time when developers built best-selling games around the act of saving NPCs, from Lemmings to Abe's Odyssey. Moons of Darsalon, out now on Steam after a whopping eight years in development, is an immediately delightful homage to that kinder era. In this level-based 2D platformer from Spanish developer Dr Kucho, you play a spaceperson sent to rescue a bunch of other spacepeople from a collection of small but very intense alien planets, shepherding them to a base using simple "follow me" or "go here" commands.
Your other tools include a flashlight for underground exploration, a laser rifle which can be used to tunnel through certain materials, and a soil cannon which lets you blob together bridges, a la Prey 2017's gloo gun. Some levels have gates that require a certain number of spacepeople to unlock, and there's usually one or two hidden inside a hillside or similar, given away by a plaintive speech bubble as you pass.
It's a blend of retro styles. The CRT overlay and fidgety, layered backdrops are pure 16-bit side-scroller, while the chintzy 3D spaceships look like Netscape loading icons upgraded into UFOs. In the hands, it feels a bit like a great Flash game from the late noughties, with a surprisingly in-depth physics system and a level editor waiting in the wings. But the tapering, floppy characters and bobbly, Happy Meal terrain also evoke Earthworm Jim – as does the game's sense of humour, which consists partly of meta jokes such as hurrying home for "pizza and PS4", but mostly of things going terribly awry.