1000 Amps is a really beautiful piece of game design. Brandon Brizzi’s latest is a tart and compact puzzle platformer that feels like, oh, let’s say Metroid blended into Chip’s Challenge with just the tiniest slice of Minesweeper on top.

It’s a game about bringing light to the darkness, and you play as Plug, a little energy-saving lightbulb sort of guy who wanders around a series of strange, intricate environments slowly turning the power back on. The adventure’s broken into rooms, and each room starts as a blank slate that you slowly transform by stumbling through it and uncovering the geometry as you go.

Every room will have a series of light blocks, which steadily power-up your jump and must all be uncovered to fix the nearby geometry in place. Brizzi’s a very devious designer, and that ever-charging leap of yours means that many of the game’s rooms have to be tackled in a very specific way. 1000 Amps really captures that sense of wobbling around tentatively in a murky space, and it blends platforming together with hidden object mechanics in a fascinating manner.

There’s a teleport move that should break the game but actually makes it a hundred times more enjoyable, and a range of obstacles such as travelators and horrible little things that rush back and forth switching lights off after you. Let’s call them ‘my mother’. The best sequences see a series of rooms fitting together like circuit boards – did I mention it’s also a little like VVVVVV?

On top of all that, 1000 Amps features Ode to Joy, played at just about the plinky-plonk speed I could probably manage. Bjorn the Unicorn and John McClane will be pleased. Oh, and Beethoven, I guess. Here’s the trailer!

1000 Amps is available for PC and Mac. Get it from Steam right here.