Who doesn’t love intestinal parasites? They’re cuddly, sweet and go out of their way to be helpful. Forget puppies, kittens and Komodo dragons, this Christmas, all good children will be wishing for a tapeworm.
The good news is, that they can all have one, thanks to Dundee’s newest indie gaming superstar – Lowtek Games.
Hot on the heels of the studios last release – Flea! – comes the rebelliously retro and flambouyantly funky Tapeworm Disco Puzzle.
The game is described as a grid-based puzzle game, which combines elements of Snake and Lolo. Because why would you not…?
The high strangeness doesn’t stop there. You take the role of a tapeworm , who owns a night club and who lives inside a cassette tape. Still with me?
In each level players have to solve different puzzles and meet different challenges like avoiding enemies, helping your friend Flea to collect blood and not die, collect all of the musical notes, activate switches, open doors, and help the beautiful Fleada (a catwalk model), get to the gig on time.
The game is a spin off sequel to Lowtek’s first game, Flea!
Ally Low, the creative mastermind behind Lowtek told us:
The original concept was created when brainstorming games that could utilize the crank on the Playdate. I liked the idea of using it to wind a worm back into a cassette tape.
The Playdate has been delayed and the sdk was taking a long time to become available so I pitched the game to a NES Dev named Valdir, he got a prototype up and running that night and we continued to add features and levels til we got to a point that we thought was good enough to share with the world.
We also brought tui, the guy who did the audio for Flea! back to help us with a killer soundtrack. We are about to launch a kickstarter for Tapeworm Disco Puzzle. Please support us!
As with Flea! Ally is planning to keep Tapeworm Disco Puzzle retro to the max, with releases on the PC, NES and Dreamcast.
NES? DREAMCAST??! What the Hell, Ally?
Why the NES? A few reasons. I grew up playing the nes and always wanted to make a game for it. Flea! did really well and I think this fits in the retro niche. There is also a growing community for new retro “homebrew games”, and there have been a few very successful crowdfunding campaigns for these projects. This niche group helped the project stand out among the many other modern games on Kickstarter.
Why Dreamcast? This one might puzzle a few but like the NES community there is also a large Dreamcast homebrew community with new games being released all the time. Unlike the NES, the Dreamcast had an exploit that allowed people to play burned games making it much cheaper and easier to produce essentially a CD over a custom cartridge.
Kickstarter Coming Soon
Ally is launching a Kickstarter to help get Tapeworm Disco Puzzle off the ground. It will launch in the near future, but in the meantime, you can sign up now and be notified as soon as the campaign commences.
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