It is surprisingly tricky to categorise HugePixel’s Omni Growth. A maze-puzzle game with physics-based movement? A single-screen arcade devour-’em-up? It’s… well, it’s what it is. (And if you’re looking for a trailer to see it in action, good luck, there doesn’t seem to be one anywhere)

“The last hope of your species. Consume your prey, evolve, and turn an abandoned galactic ship into your personal hunting grounds as you become a deadly predator.”

You step into the multi-limbed shoes of an alien organism with an insatiable appetite. Without a doubt, movement is the crown jewel of Omni Growth. It employs a quad-limb climbing and momentum system that sounds baffling on paper, but clicks into muscle memory the second you pick up the controller. You control four independent limbs, aiming and shooting them one at a time to anchor and pull your centroid around each level

It’s a delicate physics dance. Fire one limb to the right while your other three are anchored left, and you barely budge. Send a second limb to the right to join the first, and the opposing tensions leave you bobbing inertly in the middle. Commit a third, and the balance tips, dragging you rightward. Send all four limbs in one direction, and you fling yourself across the screen like a fleshy slingshot. Bearing in mind that movement isn’t limited to left and right only. You can shift around the screen in any direction.

The core loop is straightforward: use this peculiar movement to clear every enemy from single-screen levels. Once the last enemy is chomped, the exit unlocks, you drift through, and the cycle repeats. Levels are brisk, flashing past in anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes.

Ultimately, Omni Growth is a charming little time-sink that will happily swallow an hour or so of your evening. The campaign is short, and the novelty wears thin, but this is where the game’s short length becomes a strength. Then there’s the price: for less than £2, it is hard to argue with the value. Short, but sweet.

That said, I did hit quite a snag. It wasn’t until I was thirty levels in when I realised that the evolution meter was totally broken. No matter how much I consumed, it refused to fill, locking me out of my projectile attacks. I even hard reset, but the bug remained. This forced me to clear the entire game the extremely hard way, as it stripped me of my ranged attack and evolutionary advantage… I actually think it made the game better.