The next game in the Marathon is Snapshot, by the two-man team known as Retro Affect (and otherwise known as Kyle Pulver and David Carrigg). Kyle Pulver has been developing indie platformers for some time, starting with Bonesaw: The Game which got a brief mention in my round-up of indie platformer classics. But he’s better known for his later work, including Jottobots (with J. Otto Seibold) and Offspring Fling. For David Carrigg, however, Snapshot is (I believe) his first platformer, as he was previously working on MMOs (that’s Massively Multiplayer Online games, for those who don’t know; think World of Warcraft). And apparently there was a third member of the team, Peter Jones, who has since departed but did some art and animation work for Snapshot.
Snapshot’s premise is simple and immediately intriguing. The player character, a small robot named PIC, has the ability to capture certain objects by taking a photograph of them. It can then drop these items again in a different location, sometimes after rotating them first. The early stages start with simply moving boxes around, as any good platformer should, but things quickly become more complex as the variety of objects (and creatures) that can be captured grows. Springboards, projectiles, doors, flying platforms, magnets… all of these things can be captured and used in interesting ways.
