It begins like many other games — the adversary appears, snatches your girl, and runs away laughing. You raise your fist to the sky, and vow to get her back. This time though, you’re not a sword-wielding hero or a manic plumber. You’re a small brown spaceship. Your girl is a pink spaceship. And the adversary is, of course, a giant floating eyeball spaceship. So begins Nimbus, a 2D puzzle-racing game from Swedish indie developers Noumenon available on Steam.

In the game, you have to fly your spaceship past spiky traps and solve physics-based puzzles to reach the end of the level as quickly as possible. While you’re free to take the level at your own pace, the faster you complete the stage, the higher you’ll be ranked on the game’s leaderboards so if you’re at all competitive you’re likely to take the course at breakneck speed. This requires quick reflexes and often quite a few retries, but the levels are well-balanced and checkpoints are frequent, so it tends to be an addictive rather than frustrating experience. The solid gameplay is well served by the cheerful graphics and fitting retro soundtrack, making Nimbus a fun game that’s hard to put down.

The game has a very retro feel, much like indie darling Braid. As in Jonathan Blow’s classic, the simple controls and core mechanics belie a rich and rewarding gameplay experience and retro references abound. The cheap and cheerful levels look like they’ve been plucked straight from Sonic and there’s even Super Mario Brothers style overworld map that track your progress. Level elements are often old school classics, from colored keys originally found in early PC shooters to the ubiquitous spiky floors from many a platformer. Even the title’s downtempo electronic music, composed by Swedish artist Carl Karjalainen, has a distinctive retro sound.

It all adds up to well-crafted package, and one that shows the true strength of independent game development — while triple A titles may lead the sales charts, buoyed by million dollar marketing campaigns and the latest graphics, indie titles like Nimbus can rely on simple and well-crafted core mechanics wrapped in a friendly look and feel to produce a game that’s just as fun at a fraction of the cost.