What does death mean to a knight? What knight wouldn’t lay down his life in the service of his king? If the good of the kingdom demands the life of one knight, should not that knight comply? What about more than one? What about several hundred knights dying in search of a religious artefact? Infinite Monkeys’ Life Goes On puts you in control of this army of knights as they ferret out a number of “Cups of Life” in service to their king, and it makes for a delightful puzzle/platformer that plays around with a number of different physics elements.

As the name implies, Life does Go On, because one of the main points of the game is that you’ll be dying in a number of humorous ways in each level. Broken circuit? Drop a knight into it. Need to make a platform swing? Shoot a knight out of a cannon at it. Need to hold a switch down? A knight’s corpse should do nicely. Plus, you gain benefits from your fallen comrades - some puzzles might require you to stand on a pile of other dead knights or, if a knight impales himself on spikes, you can stand safely on his helmet if the spike bed is horizontal, or hang from the knight if the spike bed is vertical. This is the main focus of the game: using the corpses of other knights to solve the puzzles and get yourself to the Cup of Life at the end of the level.

As I mentioned in my preview, the controls unfortunately leave a little to be desired. When trying to land on a knight to safely cross a spike bed, I would miss more often than not because my target was so small. Other times I would try to jump and grab a knight on a vertical spike bed and end up skewering another knight. Cannons often give you a false sense of trajectory, and at times ice blocks can become unwieldy. These and other problems aren’t too aggravating on a first playthrough, but if you’re trying to complete a challenge goal or generally keep your kill count down they definitely are an issue; you begin to feel you're being punished unfairly because of the game's own flaws.

Another source of criticism comes from Life Goes On's technical inadequacies. Namely, it has a tendency to crash. If I played for more than 30 minutes, I could usually count on it crashing before I got out of the game. On my gaming PC I have 2 monitors - I play on my primary and I’ll keep task manager and other applications open on the other one for emergencies. Multiple times I’d be playing and then I’d see my second monitor go black - the game would keep playing, but if I tried to quit, my whole computer would crash. This may be an isolated incident, but nonetheless it happened to me and so I feel it's worth bringing to your attention.

Life Goes On, like many indie games I’ve reviewed recently, is pretty short. My play-time topped out at around 5 hours, but I didn’t go for all of the challenge goals (such as achieving a low kill-count, fast times, or 'finding Jeff'). At $12.99, with all of the challenge goals to consider, the value proposition is decent.

All in all, Life Goes On is a fun little puzzle game with a lot of charm and humor. As a debut title, it shows a lot of promise, and I look forward to seeing Infinite Monkeys' next project.