You are a faceless delivery drone – literally, you are a robot with no actual face – sent to retrieve samples of genetically altered lifeforms from the isolated Black Mountain research station. So isolated in fact, that it’s the only thing on the planet that you are sent to. Also it seems to be falling apart, suffering a power failure within minutes of your arrival, requiring you to restart the emergency generator. Did I mention that there’s a smug cartoon dog AI in your head named Laik that won’t let you leave unless you collect all the specimens you were sent to gather? So, ignore your growing doubts and concerns as an industrial elevator screeches down its shaft, all safeties failing and start hunting. The only way out it forward, after all.
Genopanic, by developer Mobirate, is a cute platform game about exploring a recently destroyed laboratory where horrible things have been occurring, are occurring, and will continue to occur. You play as a literal robot – the start of the game is your boot up screen – that exists only to travel to the Black Mountain research facility, pick up six Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and return with them. To this end you are assigned an AI supervisor in the form of Laik, a cartoon space dog who provides subtle hints about where you need to go next, but mostly exists to just provide snarky color commentary about you and the situation around you.
And what a situation this is. As mentioned, you barely make it into the facility lobby before the place begins to show signs of disaster. Once you get a little bit further, things reveal themselves to be even worse – the security system has gone haywire, automated drones have gone rogue and are running amok, the scientists all seem to be dead or missing, and the place is literally falling apart at the seems, with sections of wall and floor crumbling at your merest touch. Even Volga, the station’s overseer AI and Genopanic‘s mascot, wants you gone – mostly because she wants to handle things on her own, but she’s willing to throw whatever’s left of the station that’s under her control at you to… encourage you to leave. However, as Laik tells you, you have a job to do: to navigate the perils of the rapidly destructing research facility, gather the tools and weapons you need to survive and collect the GMOs, and hopefully escape in the end.
Genopanic is in an interesting position; based on its aesthetic and tone, you might suspect that it’s a Metroidvania with its emphasize on finding upgrades to allow for additional exploration and powerups to retrace your steps looking for tools to make you deadlier, or more survivable, but this is not the case. While there is an aspect of finding tools to grant you more movement and offensive options and you will revisit certain sections of the map several times, the actual gameplay is not interested in exploration for the sake of accumulating more resources to be more powerful. In fact, there’s no way to get more powerful. You start Genopanic with three health pips, and these refresh every time you pass a save station. There are no health pickups and no health upgrades. You get at most three hits before your robot explodes and you return to the last save station you passed by. There’s also a stamina mechanic in that all of your ranged weapons and two of your movement options- the slow fall jetpack and the dash move- are fed from the same energy. This energy replenishes very quickly, but it does mean you have to be deliberate in combat, especially against bosses. Also, you have a set maximum energy and there’s no way to increase that, and it always refills at a fixed rate, aside from the refill you get from save stations.
So, as your health is limited, and you have a replenishing but easily exhausted resource, the name of the game is less about combat or exploration and more about navigation, specifically safely navigating through the frequent, dangerous, and often absurd hazards that abound throughout the facility. Overgrown spikes, acid waterfalls, lava, magma blocks, randomly firing lasers that will destroy you at an instant, and more. You have to fix elevators, find hidden paths behind breakable walls floors and ceilings, and squeeze between the gaps in these hazards.
Fortunately, Genopanic handles extremely well. I played the game on keyboard, on controller, and briefly on Steam Deck, and it handled excellently on all three. It had no problem switching between controller and keyboard with no delay or stutter. Genopanic signposts itself amazingly well, and I found the game signposted its route within a room fairly well, though on a couple occasions I missed or almost missed a side path to the GMO. They do get marked on your map, though, so that was on me for not checking.
I managed to soft lock myself twice. On one, I managed to die while a moving platform was offscreen but still moving such that it was locked in a particular state when I respawned, but I was able to use the ‘restore an older save’ function to fix that issue. In the other, it seemed there was a minor change to the level geometry of a certain room between updates that made it impossible to progress, but a new patch was released within a few hours of reporting this issue.
The only issue I had with Genopanic is that it is very short. I completed my first run in about four hours, and my next in about two. That still leaves me with two endings to try and get, so at least there is a reason to replay the game more than once. Given the tiny size of the studio, and for it being their first developed game, I am quite impressed with how well Genopanic holds up. Let’s just hope they add a bit more meat to this very competent skeleton, either as a level pack in the style of the game’s demo level, or by making the sequel beefier when they get around to it.
Tim played Genopanic on PC with his own purchased copy.
