Parents' Guide to Lost Orbit

Lost Orbit is deceptively both simple and complex, if you want it to be. The power-ups you scoop up let you unlock different abilities that, interestingly, can be used to tweak the difficulty: If you want to go faster, you can incrementally bump up how much fuel and speed your jet pack gives you. Or, if you think it's plenty hard enough, you can invest in brakes and bombs, which help obliterate the obstacles up ahead that will cause you to die if you crash into them. All it takes is one hit to end your journey and have you start over from the last checkpoint, but it isn't like you only get one opportunity to explore the skill trees. At any point, if you want to make things easier for yourself, go right ahead.

But once you get about halfway into the game, you'll have to rely much more on the skill you've built up so far to really exploit the ins and outs of wrapping around the screen (steer all the way to the right to pop back on the left and vice versa), and you can use naturally occurring celestial bodies to give you a boost or send you careening after a few circular revs up. All these are risky, but at a certain point, no matter how much easier or harder you want to make the game, the action remains the same: You're always moving forward, being propelled by gravity. It's a short journey, and a simple one, but Lost Orbit isn't one to miss.