With his adorable peanut-shaped body and wacky tube-man appendages, it’s easy to imagine a plushy of Warp’s alien protagonist sitting atop your desk at work or on a small child’s bookshelf. The only question is whether you’d go for the clean plushy or the one that is drenched in the dried blood of whomever recently got in its way. Just like the movies constantly remind us, aliens are deadly, so it’s best not to provoke them by strapping them to operating slabs and performing experiments on them. Oops. Silly humans.
Warp flips the typical alien story around and has you playing as an alien who must escape from an underwater research facility. That’s easier said than done because the station is the size of the Mall of America and employs more generic henchmen than Cobra. It rests on a lot of the clichés of the stealth genre such as guards that walk in predictable patterns and turrets with laser siting. You do have a bit of help thanks to a fellow imprisoned alien who is psychically linked to you and an increasing set of powers that allow you to work through the game’s increasingly complex puzzles. Although the initial premise of hopping through walls and into objects is novel, developer Trapdoor doesn’t rest on this one trick and continually introduces new abilities and puzzles that prevent Warp from stagnating. Read more
