Welcome to our review of Widget Satchel, a platformer with puzzles and loads of action.Get Widgets. Build Doohickeys. Do Mischief. You are Sprocket, an adorable ferret on a remote space station. Escape your playpen and make your way to the shuttlebay with the most stuff!
Widget Satchel is a thrilling adventure for one little thief, with fiendish puzzles, joyous platforming, and dozens of hidden collectables. As you stumble deeper though the station evading your human caretakers, you steal things like widgets and socks. And you stash them, because you’re a ferret.
Every widget you collect adds to the weight of your satchel, making it a little harder to reach the next platform or avoid the station’s maintenance bots. Stash enough widgets, and you can use them to fabricate doohickeys, which help you unlock new paths and previously out of reach areas. It’s a ferretroidvania!
But don’t worry: You may lose some widgets (or your socks!), but Sprocket can’t get hurt and there is no “game over.” And nothing is blocking your path to the shuttlebay, so the game is only as challenging as you want it to be.
It’s up to you: race though the station at top speed, or meander around knocking over piles of junk and hitting bots with your wrench. Or… gather up all your ferret-y determination to stash away each widget, discover every trinket, and try on all 30+ pairs of socks — including a Nintendo Switch™ exclusive pair of “Joy-Sock” that match your Joy-Con™ colors!
Even after you finish the game, the adventure isn’t over. Escape your playpen again (and again) to pursue different challenges. Ferret out all those hard-to-reach areas for a higher widget count, knock around more junk for a greater mischief score, or zoom through the station for a faster finish time.
The more you play, the more of the game’s 20+ unique “feats” you’re likely to accomplish, and the more you’ll discover about the station, its human crew, and the Expedition they’re a part of. Just remember: Commander Key misses you, and is waiting patiently for you to return to her…
Widget Satchel is a weird game. The game mechanics are fun and all, but it is so chaotic that you often forget this is meant to be a game and not just any random anime you found on Netflix. For me personally, I did not fully click with the game. I think the puzzles were too confusing at times and the game did not always focus on Sprocket, I think I lost my character at least 3 times in the first 10 minutes alone. The action went so fast but it just failed to keep up.
I can understand the idea behind wanting a game with a chaotic landscape, they are not my preferred modi operandi but I can understand them. I do not understand however how a game can lose track of the character completely. I remember standing on a moving platform that moved diagonally and the game just lost me for around 3 seconds.
Mind you I am not calling this game bad or so, I just had trouble connecting to the game and while I do appreciate the idea behind the game, it just failed to entertain me, which is ok in itself. Not all games connect with everybody and this is what happened to me. I just could not seem to enjoy it.
In conclusion, as I explained, my lack of joy while playing this game overshadows my experience. It makes it harder to put a score on things and I got stuck between a 6 and a 7. Sadly I am leaning more towards the lowest score as it just came down to the nitty-gritty of framedrops and the loss of focus. The game may deserve more but needs some polishing before I revisit it though…
