TripTrip

I have a soft spot for the first game a solo developer ever ships, and TripTrip is exactly that kind of artifact. About Airplane LLC built this thing in GameMaker, posted it quietly in August 2018, and apparently nobody in the press noticed. That anonymity is undeserved, because the core mechanic here is genuinely smart. You control The Ball rolling automatically through hand-crafted levels, and your only real job is switching its color among red, blue, yellow, and green to match whatever floor is rushing toward you. Get it wrong for a split second on Normal difficulty and you are done. No health bar, no second chance. Done. The color-switching starts gentle. Early worlds only ask you to alternate between two colors, which is close to meditative. Then the game starts stacking all four colors into rapid sequences, and suddenly you are doing something that feels less like a platformer and more like a rhythm game without the music telling you what to press. That gap between the easy on-ramp and the later walls is where TripTrip either hooks you or loses you. If you like the feeling of a pattern clicking into muscle memory, the escalation is satisfying. If you want something forgiving at full speed, Easy mode gives you a life meter that absorbs mistakes, though some secrets and the so-called Good Ending are locked behind Normal or higher. The boss encounters are the most surprising part. Each world ends with a named antagonist that completely changes the rules. The Rival turns the screen into a multi-color tennis match where you reflect projectiles. The Brawler throws rainbow shockwaves you have to jump over. The Trickster runs a chaotic gauntlet with fire. These fights feel like a different game jammed into the same package, and most of them land. They break up the hypnotic lane-running with something loud and confrontational, which is exactly the right call structurally. There are also nine bonus tokens hidden across worlds, collectible through a Bonus meter that fills when you pull off specific feats during Normal play. Collecting all nine and clearing the game unlocks the Good Ending, and as of the developer's own public posts, nobody had found it for years after launch. That is either a charming mystery or a sign of the game's tiny player base, probably both. The rough edges are real. The Linux launch is broken through Steam and requires a manual workaround with the executable path, which is the kind of unfixed bug that signals a project the developer has stepped back from. A Windows framerate issue that ran the game in accidental slow motion was patched, but it went unnoticed long enough that the developer had to post about it years later. There is no colorblind mode, and the entire game is built on color perception, which is a meaningful accessibility gap the developer acknowledges honestly. The soundtrack has genuine character though, with original tracks that the developer named and cared enough about to post to YouTube. For a GameMaker first release, the audio craft here is above average. TripTrip is the kind of game that deserved a small, dedicated audience and mostly missed it. The mechanical idea is clean, the boss variety is better than expected, and the whole thing has a handmade quality that a bigger production would sand away. If you find yourself charmed by the concept, go in knowing the difficulty curve is real, the Linux version needs manual attention, and the secrets run deeper than the surface suggests.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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