Detached
You wake up to find yourself in a strange, abandoned facility. Your arms and legs have been replaced with robotic ones, and you must navigate the environment with your new limbs to uncover the truth about your situation.
Overview
Detached is a puzzle platformer where the whole idea is using your detachable limbs to solve levels. Your arms and legs serve totally different purposes whether they're equipped or detached, letting you do things like wall-run, launch and recall your arms, or control your legs remotely while you crawl. Basically, how you move and what you can do completely changes based on your body setup.
Features
Rocket Arms & Sticky Fingers
- You can launch your arms and recall them whenever you want, like Thor's hammer.
- Hitting sticky surfaces reverses the pull, sending you flying toward your arms like a grappling hook.
- Keeping your arms equipped lets you grab onto sticky walls and wall-run along them.
Semi-Sticky Physics & Environmental Puzzles
- Semi-sticky surfaces let your arms latch onto objects, so you can pull levers, rotate platforms, and rip open doors when recalling them.
- Added hinged objects that you can rotate by sticking your arms to them and recalling them. Once they rotate far enough, the arms pop off and return to you.
Remote Legs & The Crawl State
- You can detach your legs and control them remotely, letting you be in two places at once.
- Without legs, you enter a crawl state, letting you squeeze through spaces you couldn't fit through while standing.
- Added EMP fields and lead walls that block line-of-sight signals, creating spatial routing puzzles.
Design Challenges
This is currently only a prototype, the puzzle design proved to be a little harder than I thought, it's tough creating challenges that make players actually think outside of the box instead of just dropping detached limbs on a button to open a door. Because of that, it started leaning way too much toward being like Portal, with puzzle rooms, limbs being used like companion cubes, and EMP fields acting like the walls that reset your gear. The mechanics might be better suited as a fast-paced platformer where you use the limbs more for traversal. I'd love to revisit this one in some way.
What I Learned
This project is actually a downscaled version of a previous prototype, an ambitious, semi-open world fantasy Metroidvania where you could swap every body part with different creature parts to gain their abilities and even trigger set bonuses. However I realized pretty early on that this was way out of scope for a solo developer, so instead I asked myself "what is the most fun part of this idea?"
So I stripped away the large, complex systems and scoped it down to just one set of arms and one set of legs. The prototype proved that the core mechanics are definitely feasible and fun, but the key takeaway is realizing it probably belongs in a fast-paced platformer rather than puzzle chambers, which is probably the direction I'll take when I revisit it.
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