Not the Robots

Not The Robots is an interesting stealth game, featuring randomly generated levels and permadeath. You play as a robot that likes to eat furniture in bizarre office environments. In each level, there will be a series of rooms with large quantities of objects placed within it. Your common aim is to eat your quota of furniture, then make it back to the start position. Other levels give you an additional task of travelling over numbered panels in order, forcing you to plot the best route to achieve your aims.

In the first few levels, the only threat you have are laser beams that slowly turn in a circle and sometimes dangerous (electric?) floor panels that switch on and off at intervals. In some levels, there are sentry bots which seriously ramp up the games difficulty.

At the start of the level, you get a chance to look around before spawning. Once spawned, you have committed. On levels where there are sentries, it is a good idea to wait until you have space to manoeuvre, rather than immediately putting yourself in danger.

You move with the WASD keys and can crouch with Shift which gives you slower movement speed but can hide behind objects and even duck under certain lasers. The mouse is used to pan the camera, space-bar is used to eat, C uses weapons, and E/Q are used for scrolling between inventory items.

In some sense, your two main aims contradict each other. You want to survive, in which case using furniture as a shield to get past the lasers or hide from the sentry bots is vital. Your other aim of eating the furniture makes surviving harder because you are eating your means of cover. In some levels you can mindlessly run around and bash the space-bar to eat as much as possible. But on the dangerous levels, you do have to stop and think in order to maximise your chances of survival. Otherwise you will be unnecessarily increasing the laser's range and the sentry bots field of view.

In my opinion, the sentry bots are overpowered. They patrol randomly, so you cannot study them to learn their paths. Therefore you need to keep your eye on them at all times. It is very important not to get spotted due to the difficulty in escaping the sentries; they can chase at a high speed and can tear your health quickly with gun-fire. This is why cover is vital, because you need to avoid gun-fire, but also hide so they stop chasing you. It's not so bad when there is just one sentry, but you can get levels where there are up to four of them. Due to the unpredictable movements, they can end up being in a similar area and therefore render part of the level almost unreachable. Sometimes, not even hiding from them is a reliable tactic, because they have the ability to beam the furniture to another location in order to expose you.

The other problem they pose is that you can be on a level with just lasers, then the next one have to deal with four sentries. This creates a huge difficulty spike which is hard to adapt to; it takes a completely different mind-set to handle, and a large jump in skill to tackle.

You can pick up upgrades and power-ups on the map. These can take the form of extra speed, temporary invisibility, ability to destroy a wall panel, place objects, health boosts plus more.

Even though each death resets your play-through, you're still levelling up, which then unlocks different power-ups and challenges. It's a nice mechanic since it means the game adapts to try and freshen things up.

If you are a fan of these challenging games with permadeath, then I'd imagine Not The Robots will appeal to you. Personally, I thought it was quite an interesting game, but due to the severe difficulty spikes, it really hindered my enjoyment of the game. It's a stealth game, but stealth games need something to spot you or actively search for you in order to be effective. When this game has those elements, it's usually just too tough. Without them, dodging lasers isn't challenging or interesting enough.