Cut the baby talk. A universe where everybody’s dead is serious business don’t you know

Incoboto For iPhone : Stumbling around in the dark for a light switch is unnerving, and poor little Inco, the star of this game, has to do it on a grand scale. Something has caused all of the stars to go out like cheap fairy lights and without sunlight to power it, the local sungate — a pathway to other planets — can’t be used to get off this rock. Enter Helios, a strange, sun-like being, who seems to want to lend a hand. It’s hard to tell for sure, because he speaks in baby-talk, which is a little off-putting. Hmm, fiery being in the sky… solar-powered sungates… bingo! Okay, there’s a problem. Helios isn’t powerful enough to reactivate the sungate. Conveniently for Inco, a star piece has landed on his godforsaken world. Find it, feed it to Helios, and the pair will be able to advance to the next planet.

Each world is presented as a cross-section of a sphere, a bit like a 2D Super Mario Galaxy. Tap the left or right edge of the screen, and Inco runs in that direction around a planet’s circumference. Swipe up, and he jumps. On-screen buttons are available as an alternative.

The controls can be a little bit fiddly at times, but bizarrely for a game where the death of things dominates, Incoboto is forgiving.

Successive solar systems present increasingly complex challenges to reach the star pieces that unlock the next gate. Littering the landscapes are the remains of humans, who have already tried to fix things. Their failure might help you out, as they has left notes.

Solving problems means using a whole bag of tricks. Shining a beam of sunlight from Helios onto solar panels (just by holding two fingers on the screen and moving them to aim a reticule) and flicking switches springs idle machinery to life. Often, you’ll have to work against a timed mechanism that resets the equipment, if you’re too slow.

We’ve only scraped the surface of what Inco can maipulate, though. Other mechanics become available later, but we won’t tell you about them because experimenting with them is part of the game’s long term appeal. The game should be depressing, but it’s oddly uplifting.