Dakko Dakko’s HD Adventures Of Rotating Octopus Character is an upgrade of the studio’s original PSP minis title The 2D Adventures Of Rotating Octopus Character, as you might have guessed by the name. Rotating Octopus is best described as a puzzle game that looks charming but can frustrate you incredibly quickly with its very challenging levels.

The aim of the game is to collect baby octopuses across various stages while avoiding different enemy types including dogs, top hats and snakes.

However Rotating Octopus is limited in how it can move. Instead of being able to move wherever you want you have to use different surfaces to navigate levels, using different objects to create paths that the character can jump between, which is where the puzzle element comes in.

The game starts simply enough allowing you to make Rotating Octopus jump between non-moving surfaces to collect conveniently placed baby octopuses. These levels are basically the tutorial to teach you how to move, though you’ll only use either the square and x button or L & R buttons to jump or change direction. Once these basics are down you’re pretty much thrown into much more challenging stages that will test your skill and, in some cases, your patience.

[drop]The difficulty curve of Rotating Octopus is quite hard to pin down. The movement can be fickle, with your character jumping in a direction you didn’t intend it to and right into the path of an enemy which you can’t avoid.

You can also go through quite a few stages with relative ease but then one will pop up that ramps up the difficulty by quite a lot. I actually managed to get stuck on one stage because the enemy was ruthless and managed to kill me quickly which meant I had to keep restarting.

Not the whole game, of course, but the world stage I was currently playing. You see the stages are divided into different worlds each with their own themes and enemy types. You have a London stage where police hats shoot at you and desert stages where snakes chase you. If these guys get you enough times it’s game over and you’re sent back to the world select screen where you have to start that world again.

That very real loss of progress adds an extra layer of challenge when trying to navigate the stages and each lost heart is a step closer to failure. You can replenish these lives by collecting water droplets on various levels, and if you play right you can manage to get pretty much infinite lives on certain levels which have a lot of water droplets.

The HD Adventures Of Rotating Octopus Character also has a Challenge mode which has also been upgraded from the original. In Challenge Mode you have to beat stages within certain time limits and depending on how fast you do it you can get either a bronze, silver or gold star rating.

Time limits aren’t unique to the Challenge Mode as stages in the Standard mode also have time limits but they’re much more generous than the Challenge Mode ones. There is also an online leaderboard in the Challenge Mode to see how you do against the rest of the world, a welcome addition to the native PS Vita version.

What’s Good:

• There are 70 levels in Standard Mode.
• Lots of different challenges to overcome.
• Challenge adds a mode that lengthens the game.
• Cheap: only costs £2.39.

What’s Bad:

• Difficulty seems to be a bit random.
• Controlling the direction of Rotating Octopus can be a bit hit & miss.

The HD Adventures of Rotating Octopus Character is a decent looking game that can offer a challenge across a number of levels. The random difficulty spikes and the sensitive movement do hinder the game a bit but there is a certain charm here and for £2.39 it’s definitely worth a go.

You can buy it from the PSN Store here.

7/10