Today at E3 2011 I got a chance to play through the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet Xbox Live Arcade demo. It is part arcade puzzler and part exploration game. The first thing I noticed when starting is that there is no holding your hand and no tutorial. The developers want you to take your time and thing a little.  Fortunately, each puzzle and enemy has multiple ways you can approach it, and one of your tools is a scanner that points out how other objects can be interacted with.

Visually Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is quite striking.  The foreground is mostly black and then all the color comes from the background, your ship and the other enemies on screen. This style carries over between all 8 game environments but yet each one has a distinct look and feel.

When you start off you have 2 of the game's 9 tools available to use, but you quickly start getting more of them and upgrading the ones you have. Figuring out how to use each tool in the environment is part of the challenge of traversing each level. I found the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet quite challenging actually, but I also was not expecting a game that requires you to slow down and think through each section.  Once I started to do that things started moving along better. 

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is a very unique game, but one that I think will be a lot of fun for gamers looking for something with a slower pace. Plus it looks great which is always nice.