Night Sky (Hands-On) (Nintendo 3DS) Preview

The point of the game is simply to travel across the land. Any obstacles you come across can be overcome with a combination of your limited powers; how you balance the ball, the velocity at which you're travelling, when you choose to apply traction, the way the gravity is pulling. The concept at the heart of it is extremely straightforward, which is probably what makes it all so compelling - once I began playing I was there for the rest of the day. Alright, so that was only another half hour, but bear in mind that I didn't test Lost Winds 2 so that I could keep playing this.

The style of Night Sky is another part of its appeal. Against a backdrop of night sky pastel, your 'character', any environment and obstacles are displayed in stark black silhouette. Only the occasional white appears to outline separate parts of objects or eyes on blob creatures, and your central orb possesses a core that lights up in different colours to signify which power you are currently using, if any. It complements the to-the-point gameplay superbly, as does the use of the remote in NES configuration. Currently movement is on the d-pad, but in the final game motion - Excite Truck-style - is planned as an additional option.

To get you into the game, early sections involve you doing nothing more than holding the 2 button to raise your speed and bombing it over ramps so that you can land safely on the other side of gaps. Additional powers are carefully layered as time goes on, so just a few screens later you will begin to use your 'brakes' (the 1 button) to ease your way up hills or stop other unwanted descents. Gravity will come into play on certain screens next; hold the 2 button to switch the gravitational pull of the screen to come from the ceiling, which tugs you upside down so that you might get around problematic floors, your movement controls reversing in the process. It is not a mistake to write that the 2 button is used for more than one function; the abilities available to you vary from screen-to-screen. You are rarely explicitly told which you can use at any one time - though in the demo an on-screen controller layout told you which buttons themselves were usable on each screen - but it is very easy to gauge by quickly tapping the buttons to see what colour you light up: red is brake, blue is speed, purple is gravity.

Later still, you will be asked to use the A button to activate things essential to progression such as cannons, which shoot out vital blocks to pile up or bounce off other elements, or lifts to open access to different areas of the screen. This is where the puzzle elements come in; you have to carefully manipulate movable objects to either plug gaps for you to roll over or as impromptu ramps to boost yourself to higher ground. The final element that I saw was the addition of vehicles. Pop the ball into the middle of the carriage and you become a gear in the machine, turning the wheels manually. Naturally, you have to spin backwards to make them turn forwards and vice versa. Mix this with gravity and your controls are reversed twice, which makes them exactly the same as standard but somehow feels far more clever.

Nicalis made sure to point out that the music was a big element missing from our playtest due to the noise of the room at Nintendo's event. So I stuck my head up against the screen and had a quick listen to some very sober, atmospheric chimes that sound as though they will fit in nicely with the rest of the game.