Game report: Super Drift Blade

I just finished a game I originally played some months ago, "Super Drift Blade".

It's a game where you move through a sequence of rooms organized on a grid, defeating enemies and getting powerups. All the while, you are looking for the other people on your expedition team you were separate from during a teleport. So far so good, but this game has two things that make it special:

1. There is only one input, moving the mouse cursor. Try to click? You take damage. Press a key? You take damage. Your character moves to where the cursor is and you strike enemies when your cursor intersects with them while they are in range. Different weapons
2. The game centers around a timeloop, and every time you go to the next room, time advances. And as you play, you will see notifications at the top right of the screen. "Sunnika has died" "Yani has died" - your teammates are dying before you can even reach them. Eventually you died or time runs out when the clock strikes midnight, and you find yourself sent back to the start. But in between, you will have found hints scattered around, which if you manage to decipher them and follow their instruction, allow you to unlock shortcuts.

It turns out that this is a puzzle game, and specifically a puzzle game in a similar tradition as "Outer Wilds", or "Blue Prince". You continue to loop, open new paths and get further on the path before time runs out. You can even save some of your friends!
...but, it's never enough. The map is too big, and even if you manage to reach one in time, it takes you too far away from the others. You can't save them all. Time and Space themselves are against you, and they cannot be bested... right?

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I found this game quite enjoyable. I initially played the Demo, then bought the game and managed to reach the end even though some of the puzzles were quite tricky. But I had no choice but to solve them on my own because there were no guides and barely any discussion in English, only Chinese. This motivated me to write a steam guide myself for all the puzzles until the 'end', or at least until the first ending.

After that point I couldn't progress anymore, and stopped playing for some months.

When I came back, someone else had made a complimentary guide for the part of the game after the first ending, and that helped me finish it in an evening.

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If you like somewhat unusual puzzle games, I can definitely recommend this one. Costs less than 7€ and is currently on sale at 30% off. Try the demo if you're not sure if its for you.