PixelJunk Shooter has got a silly name. Of course, the latest release under the Q-Games’ PixelJunk brand of downloadable games for the PlayStation Network is a “shooter” in the traditional sense. You control a spaceship and that spaceship certainly has a gun, but the object of the game is hardly spraying bullets at wave of enemies. PixelJunk Shooter is really a puzzle game at heart, a game where each chamber your little ship enters is a new riddle to solve. It is also their most accessible game to date, and one I highly recommend.

When comparing their newest release with their previous efforts, nearly every element of PixelJunk Shooter is more akin to PixelJunk Monsters than PixelJunk Eden, their last game. Eden was highly abstract and experimental, with bold colors and an electronic trance-inducing soundtrack. Shooter is more like Monsters in that it keeps things simple, using cartoony-graphics and mild music that fades into the background.

The basic objective of the game is to guide your spacecraft into the depths of an alien planet, rescuing stranded humans and collecting treasure. Saving humans is the primary goal of each stage, as the doors to the next chamber will not open until everyone has been accounted for. Treasure is needed to proceed deeper into the planet’s core, as later stages become unlocked based on the total number of jewels you have found.

In a design decision I applaud, the jewels you recover are never replaced which makes subsequent visits more streamlined. If you only missed one jewel on your first playthrough, that will be the only jewel left to find. Otherwise you would have no choice but to seek out and recover every single jewel again in the hopes of finding the one you need. This is another break from the PixelJunk Eden gameplay model which forced you to start each stage from scratch.

Your vessel is a sturdy one that can resist bouncing off of cave walls which is important because the controls are a little floaty (hey, it’s a spaceship). The left stick maneuvers your craft while the right one controls the direction you face. Pushing both sticks in the same direction accelerates at high speeds, useful for quick escapes when a lava flow is heading your way.

Lava? Yes, I was getting to that. While colliding with solid rock isn’t a problem, your ship is extremely sensitive to heat. Your temperature gauge is essentially your life bar. Should you overheat, your ship bursts into flames and crashes to the ground. Completing each stage is less about shooting the little monsters that pop out at you and more about safely navigating the elemental hazards, taking care not to kill any people by accident. The survivors you seek are just as vulnerable to the elements as you, plus they are particularly susceptible to being shot.

The survival of those survivors is the key to completing each level in PixelJunk Shooter. Your ship can be destroyed an infinite number of times and the only penalty will be returning to the start of the chamber (but not the level, the game is very forgiving in this respect). However, if five humans die then it’s Game Over. The good news is that this should never happen to any player who proceeds with caution, as there is a “coin” system that offers 1ups for every 100 you collect. These coins are both out in the open and generated by slain enemies, so unless you’re actually aiming for the humans you should be able to recover from your mistakes before the counter ever approaches five corpses.

This gentle difficulty curve, combined with the simple controls, are what makes PixelJunk Shooter so instantly user-friendly and rewarding. There’s almost nothing to “get used to” here, as was the case in Eden. The only thing you need to figure out is how to safely extract the humans calling for aid. Some of them will even interrupt their cries for help with tips if you get stuck, though how the game determines when you are “stuck” I could not say.

If there is a downside to being their easiest game yet, Shooter is also the shortest game to bear the PixelJunk brand. There are three episodes which contain five or six levels apiece. While each episode has a distinct look and feel, and the elements and hazards become increasingly complex as you descend, there’s nothing to stop you from flying through to the end. There is more than enough treasure in the first two episodes to unlock the final stage, which players can enter without clearing the levels before it. Even if you do play through every stage, you’ll be watching the credits roll in what feels like no time at all.

Still, I’d rather a game kept me wanting more than drag itself out or render the final stages impassibly difficult, so I do not believe this detracts from PixelJunk Shooter in any meaningful way. The ending even has a cliffhanger of sorts, teasing that more episodes are in the works as DLC (called PixelJunk Shooter Encore, I presume). What’s more, the replay value is quite high as few players will likely find every jewel or rescue every survivor on their first playthrough. There’s also the standard PixelJunk online leaderboards, this time including a “score attack” display that will stoke your competitive nature as you try to master each level.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the curious decision to make the “spin” function require a rotation of the right stick. It’s not the kind of motion that comes easily, and given that the game only uses two of the eight buttons available I would have much rather pressed one of those unused buttons instead. It’s not game-breaking, nor is it even as irritating as PixelJunk Eden’s SIXAXIS “jerk” command, but it’s a misstep in an otherwise brilliant control setup.

Each game in the PixelJunk series impresses me more than the one before it. For all the talk of console “exclusives,” I’m surprised more attention and marketing muscle isn’t paid to promote this brand to consumers. Perhaps the ease-of-use and more relatable mechanics (and title) will help PixelJunk Shooter reach the mainstream audience it deserves. I highly recommend this game to players of all ability levels.

Daniel Feit was born in New York but now lives in Japan. Follow him on Twitter @feitclub or visit his blog, feitclub.com