I want the Droid app market to take off. I want there to be as many wild indie games for my Droid as for my friends’ iPhones, all organized into a market that’s easy to search. But I’ll settle for a dozen more games like Droid Odyssey.

Droid Odyssey is an adorable puzzle platformer from new indie devs Carbon Crystal Entertainment. Your goal is to guide your robot avatar through the level, whether that means avoiding obstacles or solving puzzles.

Players have a simple set of controls to manage their robot. Everything can be defeated using the left arrow, the right arrow, and a special robotic power to pick up or put down an item. Although it takes a little while to adjust to using the arrows as thrusters in flight, the controls never left me feeling the unresponsive frustration that plagues mobile touchcreen games.

Your robot will need to activate levers, unlock doors, time jumps and otherwise make his way to the goal. The difficulty is almost perfect here, I died enough times to feel a sense of accomplishment when I completed a level (and enough to watch the adorable death sequence quite a few times), without getting frustrated or feeling like I was playing an unbalanced beta.

The gameplay is addictive. Seriously. Droid Odyssey made me miss my stop on the subway… more than once. If there were more levels, I’d probably still be on the Red Line. The controls are simple, but there’s a lot of variation in playing styles. I handed the game over to a friend at one point, and was just blown away at how differently he played. (Then I made him give it right back, because I hadn’t completed the game yet.)

Your droid avatar is adorable, and the backgrounds are sweetly retro, but the game doesn’t fall back on cuteness to keep players interested. One of the things I like best about indie games is the variety of unique styles, and Droid Odyssey has a cartoony scifi look for an engaging puzzle platformer.

There’s background music, but I’ve already written pretty extensively on how game music just doesn’t do it for me. You can turn the ingame sound down, though, and listen to Pandora or your music collection while you run your robot through the levels.

Droid Odyssey is currently a beta, but it’s a stable, smooth beta, and I can’t wait for the finished version with more levels and more playtime.

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