How infographic-obsessed indie puzzler Metrico found a home on PlayStation Vita

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...10/Metrico.jpgDon’t call Metrico a puzzle platformer. “We hate the term,” says Digital Dreams’ lead designer, Geert ‘Gene’ Nellen, through clenched teeth. “There are a lot of puzzle platformers. We try to avoid [the term] – but you’ve said it and now it’s too late.”Metrico is a Vita-exclusive ‘action puzzler’, then. The quiet highlight of Sony’s independent games booth at Gamescom 2013, in Metrico every step must be measured and considered against the environment. How you move affects the shape of the world: bar charts rise and fall based on your movements across the X axis, peaks and troughs form as you climb the Y axis, and the world is reshaped based on your movements.Quickly, the game introduces new rules. Perhaps moving right appears to raise a platform by a single percentage point with each step, but the platform quickly grows too high to reach. So how can the player move right without affecting the statistics?“I feel some puzzle platformers are a bit gimmicky,” says Nellen. “They’re cool, but we have the feeling that Metrico’s mechanics are just a little bit different than [those in] other games. I don’t like us to be put in a box and I hope it stands out that way… and also aesthetically. People associate [data representation] with Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations and boring stuff, but they can be beautiful, so why not make a game with infographics?”

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