Zerosphere

Amazingly and thankfully the Amiga is still getting new games released every year, making 2015’s Zerosphere almost feel a little old. However, it remains one of the best releases in some time.

It all started at the Evoke 2015 demoparty event in Köln, Germany. For the uninitiated, these events which are quite common throughout Europe are designed to show off your computing skills in a variety of categories, sometimes pushing systems both old and new to their limits. It’s all about creativity and has led to some memorable art over the decades. Zerosphere was the winning entry of the interactive contest that year.

The game is simple but ingenious in concept. A regular platformer where you collect all the gems before using the swirly exit portal. Complicated by all the surroundings above and below your eyeline being warped out of shape. If you ‘squint’ by pressing fire then you can see everything clearly. Although only for a limited amount of time on your squint bar. So you’d better remember where you need to jump quickly.

There are the usual hazards you might expect such as flying and walking baddies, lava pools, deadly drips, stuff that will crush you. There’s even a sort of big bad. The evil nemesis pyramid to your typically Amiga-ish blob. The story is tokenism at it’s best to get you into the action with a sensible chuckle. The graphics are cute and the music is funky chip tunes.

After winning the Evoke competition, game designer Losso spent some more months polishing everything into a ‘final’ version fit to release to the masses. But it didn’t end there. The game was expanded from the 25 levels in the free version to 40 levels in a new boxed commercial release in 2018. Working on all the standard Amiga models, including the CD32. There were some other additions such as new enemies and control options. The collectors package was filled with extras like sprite sheets, stickers and a Yo-Yo. You can see what a great product it was in this review with lots of pictures. There’s also a digital download option – with goodies. You can see it all on the publishers site PolyPlay.

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The 2015 version is still freely available on the official site. There is even a trainer thanks to the Amiga community. Not that you’re likely to need it. Zerosphere is a fairly short game and not too difficult after some practice. Due to the time limit on each level it’s actually well suited to some carefree speed running. A nice quick to play game you can chill out with.

There’s not much in the way of trivia around Zerosphere, and the game is quite straight forward so rather than me ramble on any further I thought it better to do a quickplay video. That accidentally turned into a longplay, so here ya go.