Fetch Quest

Do you often find yourself sitting at your computer with three minutes to kill? As someone who can easily spend twelve or more hours per day at a computer during the week, I know it happens to me fairly often. You need a quick mental break between two tasks, or you want to find something better to do than count down the seconds on your watch when you've got a conference call coming up. This is where Muon comes into play.

Muon is a fast-paced platformer where you have only one objective: make it through ten randomly generated screens as quickly as you can. Each screen contains five boosters, one gate, and any number of blocks, all of which are scattered randomly about. No enemies or traps here - it's just you against the blocks. To clear a screen, you must enter the gate, which starts out locked. To unlock, you must collect the stage's five boosters. That's just about all there is to the game: collect five boosters, enter the gate, repeat ten times, game over.

If it sounds simple, that's because it is. Remember, we're talking about a typical game session of about three minutes here; complicated would work against that. The game is controlled entirely with the arrow keys, which you'll master in about fifteen seconds. Sound effects are fairly simple, but effective. There is no music unfortunately, so you may want to have an MP3 ready to go if you want some background tunes. A more glaring omission is the lack of any kind of high score table. For a game whose entire premise revolves around moving from start to finish as fast as you can, it's really a bummer not to keep track of your runs over time. It's also worth noting that this game isn't exactly what you'd call deep; while it's perfect for burning a few minutes here or there, don't expect to be able to extend your sessions out to fifteen or twenty minutes without getting bored.

Download [Muon]