From the Norwegian indie team D-Pad Studio, here he was Savant – Ascent REMIX. This launched on consoles and PC back in September 2023, but got a REMIX upgrade for the Nintendo Switch launch.

It’s a punchy arcade shooter type game that moves at a hell of a rate. Excellent for pick-up-and-play shenanigans, it doesn’t prey too much on your time, all whilst its increasingly complex mechanics make for rewarding fun and games.

Savant – Ascent REMIX

Okay, we wanted to try this one as it’s by D-Pad Studio. That’s the team behind one of our all-time favourite games in the very beautiful Owlboy (2016). Savant – Ascent REMIX is a very different type of game, but has many merits all the same.

For less than a tenner, you can get this thing on all consoles and Steam. And you can think of it as an adaptation of ’90s style on-rails shoot-em-up type deals.

As the player, you take control of an acrobatic wizard dude. Your goal is to reach the top of a massive tower and, do that, you ride a huge elevator and must blast away enemies as you rise.

The further you get up, and the more enemies you kill, the more power-ups you get (and the more powerful you become). You’ll need that as the gets tricky fast, with waves of enemies flooding in from every angle. The controls are deceptively simple and you need to be multi-tasking projectile avoidance alongside your own shooting and the like. Behold!

It’s frantic stuff and very compelling. At its best, anyway, as the thing with this sort of game is it can get repetitive. We guess that’s out one gripe, although D-Pad does do a great job in shaking up the formula across each level with new and dramatic things.

But you are, ultimately, just shooting stuff over and over. That’s great for short bursts of play, not so much if you want to sit there for two hours on the thing.

Still, it’s fun and it looks great (that trademark D-Pad Studio illustration style is there). And there’s an energetic score to go with things, too, with the work by Norwegian musician Savant (yes he’s called that, very apt for the game, eh?).

There’s only about an hour of gameplay with the main story, but there’s plenty of shooty replayability to this one if you do find yourself addicted. Apparently, a completionist run demands about seven hours of gameplay. Impressive for a game that initially seems rather short.

This was obviously a much smaller project for D-Pad Studio complete. Owlboy took 10 years to make, this one will have been a hell of a lot less! It’s good to have the team branching out its library as we also wait for its next game (Vikings on Trampolines).

Yeah, then, Savant – Ascent REMIX is damn good fun. Pick-up-and-play excellence that serves its purpose to near perfection.