The Shards of Pluto

The Shards of Pluto is a short platforming game developed by Giaks. It was submitted as an entry in the No-RM Event of October 2015.

Summary/Story: Nonexistant and Irrelevant
The story of The Shards of Pluto is that you are a space-dude in space, jumping on space-rocks and shooting space-flying-eyeballs. Was I on Pluto? Did somebody blow up Pluto, causing the planet to become a series of floating platforms?

Who knows, it's not important and providing a concrete explanation would just get in the way of what is fundamentally a short game that you jump into immediately and finish fifteen minutes later.

Presentation: Well done.
First things first: the background music in this game is an excellent piece that really adds to the game's atmosphere.

Visually, The Shards of Pluto is a game with less than a dozen individual elements that need to be displayed. While it's not going to have screenshots enshrined in an art museum anytime soon, it provides a good graphical depiction of what's going on.

One graphical issue (pictured above) is that the cave levels contain foreground images that block out the view of everything that the player interacts with. This isn't actually a problem by itself (rather, having to figure out where platforms will be from memory adds an interesting gameplay element to the cave levels), but when compounded with an issue where platforms are frequently generated in ridiculously large quantities and the player has not enough warning to move to a safe location.

Gameplay: Fun, but with no staying power
Gameplay in the Shards of Pluto consists of jumping between platforms that are horizontally scrolling in both directions. Allowing your character to fall off the edge of the screen results in a death, although the character is respawned almost immediately and there is no limit to how many times this can be done.

Platforms are sometimes generated in such quantities that they form walls. In times like this, the player might have to relocate to either higher or lower ground in order to avoid being swept off their platform. Unfortunately, as the platform generation seems to be random, there is no guarantee that any given wall of platforms can actually be solvable. The view-obstructing foreground images in the second and fourth levels of the game likewise complicate things when large amounts of platforms are on the screen.

In theory, there's another gameplay aspect in the third and fourth levels where the player shoots down flying eyeball creatures, but as far as I can tell the eyeball creatures don't damage or push the player's character in anyway, so there's no downside to just ignoring them for the entire game.

The enemies could conceivably be used as a sort of scoring mechanism (shooting your gun uses the same energy that is used for double jumps and jetpack usage, and the player might sometimes be forced to choose between remaining where they are or moving to a less safe location where they have a shot on an enemy). Unfortunately, to my knowledge the game currently does not track how many enemies are killed.

There is a 2-player mode, but I have not tried it.

Ultimately, while the gameplay is engaging for the first few times the game is played, it will likely grow old after a few playthoughs. Since a playthrough is quite short to begin with, this game will likely not hold a player's attention for too long.

Final Verdict: Try it
The Shards of Pluto is most likely not going to go down in history as a revolutionary groundbreaking game. It provides one form of gameplay that doesn't change from the start to the end of the game, and the amount of playtime most players rack up on the game likely won't even exceed an hour.

Even so, that less-than-an-hour that I spent playing this game wasn't a bad way to spend part of an afternoon.