Also On: PSN, PS3, PC
Publisher: Curve Studios
Developer: Curve Studios
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: Leaderboards
ESRB: T
Over the last few months, the Vita has become home to a whole bunch of incredibly hard games. Off the top of my head, thereโs Hotline Miami, Pixeljunk Monsters: Ultimate HD, Life of Pixel and Limbo โ all of them extremely challenging and, perhaps not coincidentally, all of them extraordinarily good.
As you might have surmised from the page youโre reading, thereโs another name you can add to the list of very difficult/very good Vita games: Stealth Inc. Itโs arguably the easiest of the bunch, but thatโs not saying much; for every level I beat, I probably died about 10 to 15 times. Also slightly lessening the level of difficulty is the fact that, as a puzzle-platformer, the gameโs solutions generally seemed easy enough to figure out, even if they were challenging to pull off. (And, to top it all off, Iโm not going to lie or pretend to have any pride: itโs not hard to find walkthroughs for the gameโs PC version, where it was titled Stealth Bastard.)
Of course, what Stealth Inc. lacks in terms of (relative) difficulty, it makes up for with its commitment to constantly reminding you of how terrible you are at the game. Demotivational statements are peppered throughout, along the lines of what GLaDOS says to Chell in the Portal games; they arenโt spoken, obviously, but that doesnโt make them any less insulting. After you finish each level, the game gives you a letter grade and compares your times with everyone else in the world. Maybe Iโm just terrible at the game, butโฆactually, no, scratch that: going by my grades and my times, Iโm definitely terrible at it. Some people โ wizards, or perhaps game-playing robots โ are evidently amazing at flying through levels with obscenely great times and scoring S-ranks, but for the most part I found the levels to be constant exercises in trial-and-error-fueled humiliation, some of which, if I was lucky, ended with a B-rank.
Needless to say, I loved it. Those GLaDOS-style insults? Much like in Portal, theyโre hilarious. In fact, you can take the comparison to Portal a step or two further, since you can see Valveโs beloved puzzler written throughout Stealth Inc.โs DNA. Admittedly, that makes the game feel ever-so-slightly less original, but in all the hours I put into the game, I canโt say that there was any point in time at which I thought to myself, โMan, this game lacks originality.โ
Instead, I was thinking, โThis game is so awesome.โ That, or silently cursing Curve Studios for making a game thatโs equal parts insanely addictive and fiendishly difficult. Thatโs a dangerous combination if you ever want to put a game down โ though why youโd ever want to put Stealth Inc. down, I donโt know.