'ElecHead' Is the Smartest Video Game I've Played This Year

I want to show you something cool, a moment that made me clap my hands.

I had moments like this every few minutes (!!) in ElecHead.

It took me less than two hours to finish ElecHead, a game about manipulating electricity and solving puzzles, and it was some of the best time I spent in a game this year. Every room crackled with creativity, and it constantly made me feel like the smartest person in the world.

In ElecHead, players control a little socket-y character whose main ability is being able to electrically charge objects and surfaces by touching them. This allows you to "power" parts of the environment in good and bad ways. Maybe it'll move a platform in your direction, but it could also turn on a series of killer fireballs. This is given complexity early on with the ability to toss your head in a few directions, letting you temporarily charge an area while the rest of your body is free to run around and perform actions—but only for a precious 10 seconds.

It is easy to imagine a version of ElecHead with 200 levels, and I would probably play that game, because I found the basic mechanics interesting enough that I'd happily go back.

It's a game with a few precious but neat ideas deployed in increasingly surprising ways that uses the little repetition it has to ensure players understand how a mechanic works, so that soon enough, the game can ask you to use it in a completely different and surprising way. Some of those surprises were too clever for me to figure out, but even when I looked up the solution, rather than being dismayed that it never occurred to me, I typically laughed in response, because the answer wasn't a designer being too clever by half, it was just cool.

Let me give you one example. ElecHead is divided into several numbered zones, and you can freely swap between them through the game's menu system. When you reach the fifth zone, it's unclear how you're supposed to move forward. It's easy enough to "unlock" the zone by tossing your head to a nearby platform, but you can't actually reach it. In ElecHead, if you're disconnected from your head for more than 10 seconds, you explode. That 10 seconds is plenty of time to get a lot done, but there's seemingly nothing to get done here.

I poked and prodded this room for a few minutes before throwing up my hands. In general, the answers in ElecHead are in the room in front of you—you don't have to go digging. But this only sharpened my frustration, because the game was clearly dangling the information!

I enjoy puzzle games, but also realize my brain is easily bested by them, so I don't stress looking up walkthroughs and hints. When I researched the answer to this puzzle, my reaction was equal parts distress and hysterics. Remember how I mentioned you can warp between zones? Think about that for a second. You can't reach the platform where the warp is located, but you can activate it. What if you went back into the game's interface, and tried to warp to the very zone you'd just unlocked? Now, cut to a GIF of Patrick's brain melting.

It rules! It rules. I wasn't even mad, and this feeling happens all the time in ElecHead.

So many video games frustratingly outstay their welcome, dragging out once-novel ideas in service of hitting an arbitrary amount of gameplay time, because the too-ravenous gaming audience frequently correlates game length with quality. It's refreshing, then, when a game is careful and deliberate about its ideas, and exits stage left when it's exhausted them, leaving you simultaneously desperate for more but buzzing over the limited time spent in that world.

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).