Pompom: The Great Space Rescue follows the story of a hamster named Pompom who must rescue his human friend Hoshi after he was kidnapped by pirate cats.  Based on the screenshots, I expected the game to be akin to Super Mario World if Mario was replaced by a hamster.  But when I started the demo, I quickly realized that my assumption was quite wrong.  You see, you don’t actually control Pompom at all.  In fact, our little hamster pal walks and jumps automatically.  So what’s the humble player’s role in all this, hmm?  Well, your job is to lay down platforms, springs, etc. in order to complete Pompom’s path and get him to the end of the level.

The demo is quite generous and covered a whopping 8 stages, not including the tutorial and a boss fight against one of the pirate kitties.  Much of this time was spent creating a pathway for Pompom as he ventured obliviously forward, seemingly unaware of the dangers ahead.  And for such a cute game, I’ll admit that I got a bit stressed trying to stop Pompom from falling to his doom.  Sure, you can pause time in order to place platforms with more precision, but you can’t do this indefinitely, meaning you still need to make decisions quickly.  The good thing is that the game is somewhat forgiving when you make mistakes, as every checkpoint gives you a bubble that allows you to survive your death just once and redirect Pompom to a safe place somewhere else on the screen.

If the game was only about placing platforms for Pompom to cross, I think it would have been a rather dull experience.  Fortunately, there are other ways that you can interact with the environment that made the game much more interesting.  For example, you can click on the sunfish to make them jump out of the water, turn fans so that they blow Pompom through the air (as long as he’s equipped with a handy umbrella), use scissors to make a path through unruly vines, and even carry a lantern to keep ghosts at bay!  And considering all of this was available just in the demo, I have to wonder how many other interesting mechanics the rest of the game has to offer over the course of eight worlds!

Oh, but there’s one very important detail I have neglected to mention up until this point.  Since I was playing this game on the Switch, you’ll be using motion controls in order to maneuver the cursor around the screen.  While motion controls can sometimes be rather finicky, they generally worked quite well in this demo.  It was only towards the end that I felt like I had to frequently re-center the cursor, which made the experience just a bit more frustrating.  I have no idea if this issue was related to the game or was just a problem on my end.

Pompom: The Great Space Rescue is not your conventional retro-style platformer.  So if you just want to run and jump your way through colorful, 16-bit stages, then this game probably isn’t for you.  But if you’re looking for something a bit different, then perhaps you might want to give this cute, little game a try.  Pompom is available on the Nintendo Switch, all major operating systems, and Android for $9.99 and can take 5-11 hours to complete, depending on how many of those collectible coins and carrots you feel like gathering up.