Tapeworm Disco Puzzle is a retro style puzzle game with a ton of humour and charm where you play as a worm who has to collect items in a maze with only a limited number of moves.
The game is from Lowtek Games who created the game Flea, and was crowd funded and saw a launch on PC, as well as for the NES and Sega Dreamcast.
You can check out our video review of the game on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube Channel on the video below.
The version tested for review today is on the Evercade VS, where it is available as the first of the Evercade’s Game of the Month. This is a new promotion from Blaze who created the Evercade where users can update their Evercade and get a free game to play for a month. After the month is over, a new update will be available and will swap out the monthly game for a new one. Later this year, Blaze will release Indie Heroes Collection 2 which will feature of the games from the Game of the Month series and you’ll be able to buy them to keep on a cartridge.
As a last note, I’ll mention that for this Game of the Month download, the game is only playable on the Evercade VS and cannot be downloaded onto the Evercade handheld system.
Tapeworm Disco Puzzle sees you control a worm and the objective on each level is usually to collect a bunch of music notes that are dotted about the screen. There are occasionally enemy insects to dodge, but the main challenge is that you can only move across the grid of the level a certain number of moves. Once they’re used up you just sit there. Luckily you can backtrack to gain moves back, and the strategy comes in finding the best route across the levels with the limited number of moves.
There is some variety to the challenges, as on some levels you have to help guide a friendly character to an exit without them getting killed. This idea reminded me of the game Lemmings, although the gameplay wasn’t in the same style.
The most challenging levels were more action focussed where the worm continually moves like in the old mobile phone game Snake. You have to steer the worm to make sure it doesn’t crash into obstacles such as spikes and this means you have to complete the whole level in one go without being able to pause to work out the best route.
The game features 100 levels and is a lot of fun. There is definitely a sense of an increase to the difficulty for later levels, but even the most taxing levels could be achieved with a few minutes of trial and error. Perhaps the most challenging levels came when you had two worms which moves in mirror to each other that you control at the same time. These could be tricky to get your head around, but proved to create fun opportunities for puzzles.
Presentation wise, the game looks and sounds like a NES game, which is both art style choice and that the game was released on the NES so does literally have that graphical limitation. Despite this, the graphics do still have a modern feel in that the character design and humour feels more up to date then what you’ll have sound on the actual NES. The soundtrack is fun and bouncy and you’ll probably be humming along after a while.
As a free game for this month on the Evercade this will be a great selling point for the upcoming Indie Heroes Collection 2, as although this game is fairly short, as part of a 10-12 game collection this will be a great addition.
If you want to play the game between this month and when the Indie Heroes Collection 2 releases, you’ll easily be able to get the game on Steam, or if you want to really scratch your retro itch, you could get a copy on the NES or Dreamcast.
Conclusion
Tapeworm Disco Puzzle is a lot of fun. For this month it’s free so would definitely say every Evercade VS owner should download it. We’ll make sure we review the whole package of Indie Heroes Collection 2 later this year when it releases.
But just for the game for its own merits of gameplay, presentation and so on, the game is one we can really recommend. The biggest drawback is the length as I completed it in just a couple of sittings, but it’s also the case that the game gets done before you’re likely to grow tired of it. In this sense it does leave you wanting more.
The characters are all fun and build on the universe of the game Flea, so hopefully the insect world will continue to grow for future games.
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