Gets To The Exit is not without problems. The art assets are tiny and unattractively fiddly, the audio is amateurish and annoying, and the difficulty curve is frustratingly uneven. Regardless of all that, however, the design team has hit on a puzzle mechanic that really works. While this isn’t a particularly polished game, in other words, it delivers on the kind of arcade pleasures that can often render polish unnecessary.
The task of each 2D level is to get your gaggle of tiny, brainless tribesmen from A to B across a swathe of perilous terrain. Control is indirect, however, so while your team races back and forth, plummeting from ledges, hitting walls, and turning 180s, it’s up to you to stay a few steps ahead of them, raising and lowering columns of land to create bridges, as if manipulating some huge geological bar chart.
With hazards like spikes and lava to avoid - and potentially useful elements such as bounce pads and little bridges to employ - it’s exhilaratingly precise stuff, and it allows for a surprising degree of variation, too. Some levels are merely concerned with finding the right heights for your various platforms, for example, while others require constant micromanagement as you shift the landscape about, keeping time with a strict sequence.
Ugly, punishing, and extremely satisfying, Gets To The Exit is a raw kind of fun. It’s the perfect companion for a lengthy commute, and an ideal antidote to empty-headed App Store slickness. [8]