Turbo Pudding
Most of Helicorn is about breaking the Paver’s road machines. But every wreck drops something, and some of what drops is plainly odd. It’s Friday, so here is the oddest stuff Thistle can catch, and what the crew on the radio has to say about it.
The usual suspects
Bonuses float at Thistle’s height inside a glowing ring, and flying through one is all it takes. Some of them are what you would expect. A green leaf-heart patches up her armor, and if she’s already in one piece, it pays 100 Scrap instead. A glowing hoop adds two shield rings. A wooden crate with a missile painted on it tops up the racks. A horseshoe magnet pulls in every cog and bonus on the screen. A big glossy pinecone is one more Bloom Bomb, or, as Old Hatch puts it, “Pinecone well spent.”
Then things get stranger.
Espresso, Lunch Break and Lost & Found
A steaming tin cup is Espresso. For eight seconds, the gun fires twice as fast, and five quick rising blips play as you grab it.
A blue lunch tin with a whistle is Lunch Break. The whistle blows twice, and for three seconds the machines stop and every enemy shot hangs in the air right where it was. Even the boss at the end of a world stops for a second and a half. On every trail, the lunch tin is the rarest bonus there is.
A taped cardboard box with a luggage tag comes from Lost & Found, and nobody knows what’s inside until it’s open. There are four possibilities: a shower of 15 golden cogs worth 25 Scrap each, two extra levels for your gun, a little white Helper drone with a green dome that circles Thistle for 15 seconds and shoots at whatever is closest, or ten seconds in which every machine you break pays double Scrap. The shower is the most common surprise, and the double pay is the rarest.
Machines that bring presents
Every so often a small yellow forklift drives across the screen with a crate on its forks. That’s a Forklift Carrier, and it never shoots. Break it, and the crate always pops a bonus. Over open water the same job goes to a Crate Skiff, a little boat with a striped crate, and on the harder trails the skiff fires back.
How often these presents come depends on the trail you pick. On Picnic, the gentlest, one turns up roughly every eight seconds, and the forklifts drive slower. On Backcountry, the toughest, you wait about 45.
Guns from the garden shed
The guns come in capsules, and catching the same gun twice makes it grow, up to level 5. Their names sound like things from a garden shed, and when a new one clicks into place, someone on the radio has an opinion.
The Chipper is the nose cannon, with white-gold tracers. Hatch: “Chipper. Old faithful.” The Sprinkler sprays a fan of teal droplets, three at first and seven at the top level. Wren Ashby, the pilot, sums it up: “Sprinkler. Watering can with opinions.” The Bucksaw throws a spinning saw disc that cuts through several machines in a row. Hatch again: “Bucksaw! Mind the trees. Actually, don’t.”
From Rustrock Canyon on, a capsule can hold Jumper Cables, an orange crackling arc that jumps from one machine to the next. Tilly, on dispatch, is delighted: “Jumper Cables! It jumps between them!”
From Saltwind Reach on, there’s the Acorn Mortar. It lobs heavy acorn shells in an arc, and a ring on the ground shows where they will land. It’s made for ground machines, but a shell that passes close to something in the air bursts anyway. Wren approves: “Acorn Mortar. Heavy. I like heavy.”
The last gun shows up at Rimeridge Glacier: Burrs, homing thistle darts fired in turn from two pods. Wren keeps it short: “Burrs. They find their own way. Like me.”
And once a gun is at level 5, every extra capsule of the same kind turns into Scrap. Hatch has a line for that too: “That’s as big as she goes. Extra Scrap now.”
Come and catch something
World 1, Greenfold Meadows, is free to play in your browser at helicorn.com. The full game, all six worlds, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Helicorn page.
