Affordable Space Adventures

Affordable Space Adventures is the clearest proof that the GamePad could be something entirely different from just a second screen with a map. The player sits in a cheap tourist-grade spaceship that crash-lands on an unknown planet, and their task is to make their way through a series of caves, factories, and dark depths toward freedom. The ship isn't controlled with buttons in the sense of a classic action game — the controller's display holds a full instrument panel with individual systems that get switched on, tuned, and switched off with a finger.

That's the whole joke of it. The engine, the anti-gravity drive, the lights, the scanner, and other modules can each be set independently, and each of them gives off a different amount of heat, noise, and electromagnetic radiation. Enemy sensors react to something different each time, so the player has to think about what they can get away with: sneaking past a motion detector at minimum power in the dark, or instead shutting off the electronics and letting momentum carry them down. The result is an unusually calm, technical puzzle game where the main weapon is understanding the system. With up to three players cooperating, control of a single ship gets split among several people — one has the engine, another the manipulator arm, a third the scanner — and the quiet game instantly turns into a comedy full of bickering and mutual accusations of giving the game away.

The presentation is understated and atmospheric — dark caves, dimmed spotlight, the occasional neon flicker of a sensor, all paired with a minimalist ambient soundtrack that underscores the tension rather than manufacturing it. An advertising parody of the cheapest possible product runs through the whole game, giving it an unexpectedly dry sense of humor. Critics received the title very warmly and repeatedly named it among the games that got the most out of Wii U's hardware. Today it's a game that essentially can't be faithfully ported anywhere else, which is why it remains one of the most valuable reasons to keep the console around even after all these years.