Let me start off this write-up with a scolding: Developers, make trailers for your games! Trojuhelnicky is a new game from developer Inputwish, who you may know from their excellent Go Rally, and it kind of sounds like this was the passion side project of one of their programmers. But gosh darn it, I know there is a very specific audience out there who would see this game in action, and hear its bleeps and bloops, and decide they were instantly sold. But unfortunately you’ll just have to check out these screenshots and play bleep and bloop sounds in your head to imagine what Trojuhelnicky is like. It’s worth the effort though, trust me.
Trojuhelnicky simultaneously reminds me of some of the very early types of games we got back with the iPhone was new, as well as an Atari 2600 game if the Atari 2600 was fed a steady diet of hyperbolic steroids and LSD. At its most basic it’s an object avoidance game, where you move your little character at the bottom of the screen back and forth trying to avoid the stuff falling from the top of the screen. Big “first year of iPhone games” energy. A twist is that you want to collect any object that is yellow, as those give you points or power-ups, and then shoot pretty much everything else you see. Except red things, which are impervious to your shots, and must simply be avoided entirely.
That somewhat basic set of rules blends into a high-score chasing masterpiece. The movement of your character, who is just a simple triangle, is immediate and precise, and the action happening onscreen between the objects falling, your bullets being shot, and enemies being hit by those bullets and exploding into a shower of particles is both chaotic and easily recognizable. Trojuhelnicky is a hot mess, a hot glorious mess, but somehow it’s totally manageable. I never once felt like I died because the action wasn’t clear, every death has been entirely my fault. And I have died A LOT.
The basic structure of Trojuhelnicky is that you’ll play for a bit, a meter fills up, and then you move onto the next level. The levels can apparently go on forever, and your ultimate goal is to end up with a score that will land you on the global leaderboards. There’s not really much more to it than that. This is a very simple game, executed very well on a fundamental level. Maybe some extra modes or options or features might add to the experience, and I kind of think you could take out the whole “moving to the next level” part and make it just one continuous endless level. But if a pure arcade game is something you can appreciate, especially one that is so easy to pick up and have be immediately enjoyable, Trojuhelnicky is pretty tough to beat.
