Being an octopus comes with its fair share of advantages: a remarkable intelligence, the power of camouflage, and the surprising ability to squeeze through impossibly small spaces. But unfortunately for one unassuming octopus, those talents are the only thing standing between freedom and life inside a tin can.
In Darwin’s Paradox!, a new puzzle-platformer out of ZDT Studio, you play as Darwin, a little blue octopus who’s whisked away from his home in the ocean one day. His captors take him to a canned food factory called UFood that specializes in seafood. It’s up to you to help Darwin escape the factory and find his way back home by using wit and the natural talents of a remarkably versatile mollusc.
With a charming aesthetic, innovative mechanics, and action-packed gameplay, Darwin’s Paradox! is an ambitious little game with quite a lot of heart, much like its eight-armed hero. Unfortunately, that ambition sometimes outpaces its technical performance, but if you can look past occasional frame drops and stutters, you’ll find a clever platformer swimming beneath the surface.
Octopuses might not have superpowers, but it sure feels like they do in Darwin’s Paradox!. Throughout your adventure, you’ll use Darwin’s innate abilities: squirting out ink, grabbing hold of and moving objects, blending into your surroundings using camouflage, and scaling walls with sticky suction cups. As an octopus, Darwin can navigate both in and out of water, and while most abilities remain the same, they behave differently depending on where you are. Ink, for example, works as a projectile on land that affects electronics, allowing you to open doors or turn off conveyor belts, while underwater it becomes a defensive cloud that blocks enemy sightlines.
Darwin is lightning-fast in the water, jetting from one side of the screen to the next with fluid ease. Out of the water, he slows down, but that’s where his camouflage and climbing abilities come into play. Most of the game takes place in or around the factory, but it successfully incorporates enough water to switch between the playstyles so you get both slower-paced puzzles and action-packed chase sequences.
There are nearly 50 chapters in the game (many of them very short), and they’ll test your mastery over Darwin’s abilities as you sneak around, solve puzzles, and run from speedy threats—and, boy, are there a lot of threats. From aliens in robot suits, to hungry barracudas, to Steven the Seagull and all of his doofy cousins, there are a lot of creatures that either want to eat, squish, or simply ruin Darwin’s day, and that’s not even counting all the environmental hazards littered around the factory.
The biggest hazard, though, isn’t to Darwin; it’s to you, the player. Performance issues mar the gameplay experience, with frequent frame drops or stutters. Most of my time with Darwin’s Paradox! was on Steam Deck, though I also played on my ASUS TUF Gaming A16 laptop and my gaming PC—the latter of which is, admittedly, getting older with its 2080 Super graphics card and i5-12600k CPU. But of the three, my desktop ran the game the best, with the least amount of performance issues. I never experienced any crashes on any of the devices, though I had to sacrifice graphics for performance on all three.
It’s a shame, too, because the game’s graphics are downright adorable. The game’s animations and character designs have a charm reminiscent of a Pixar film, giving the entire experience a polished, cinematic feel. Environmental details—like hanging signs on the factory wall or random background items—add a surprising amount of personality to the industrial factory, quietly building out the world without much need for dialogue. And as a game starring an octopus, there isn’t much dialogue outside of a short cinematic at the game’s start.
Notably, Darwin’s Paradox! features a 2.5D graphics style. Movement remains largely on a 2D plane, though the environment features elements either in the foreground or background that add dimension to Darwin’s surroundings. Occasionally, these elements created some confusion with platforming; a ledge might appear like you could jump on it when really it was a foreground object there for aesthetic purposes. Mostly, though, the 2.5D style made for a gorgeous, rich environment full of minor details worth paying close attention to.
The majority of the game’s world-building comes from its environmental storytelling or collectibles system called “Discoveries,” which reveals bits of lore about the factory and its occupants. Unfortunately, that’s about where the storytelling ends. Darwin’s Paradox! doesn’t really build toward larger narrative beats, and your goal rarely changes other than just “escape.” Each level introduces new obstacles or tools you can use to your advantage—including maze-like vents, glowing goo that scares away red-eyed rats, and aggressive anglerfish lurking in the dark—but the overall structure remains largely the same. A few mini-boss encounters or stronger narrative moments between sections might have helped create a greater sense of progression as you dive deeper into the factory.
Even so, the game rewards curiosity quite often. Darwin’s Paradox! encourages exploration through hidden Discoveries and the occasional bizarre encounter tucked away off the main path (if a sign says “Do not trespass,” you should most definitely trespass). The level design doesn’t hide quite as many secrets as a fellow platformer like MIO: Memories in Orbit, though it offers enough surprises that I frequently risked Darwin’s life by poking into corners or slipping past unexplored doors just to see what might be waiting at the end of a corridor. Sorry, Darwin!
All told, Darwin’s Paradox! took me a little less than 10 hours to complete. It rarely became difficult, though a few levels slowed me down along the way. Ultimately, the game’s biggest obstacle isn’t its design but its technical performance. If you can tolerate the occasional stutter or frame drop, there’s a clever, charming puzzle-platformer underneath it all.
