Cheese Dreams: New Moon

A round orange moon with a worried face is steered, never jumped, through ten rooms-and-doors stages of a mouse-crewed ship, gathering stars to unlock the later rescue missions.

🌙 Cheese Dreams: New Moon: One Bounce, No Jump Button

Nitrome rebuilt its 2007 game Cheese Dreams and shipped the result as the first of two parts in December 2013. The hero is a round orange moon with a worried face, adrift on a mouse-crewed spaceship where the corridors bristle with spikes, cheese and helmeted rodents.

The control idea is the entire design. Nothing jumps: the moon rebounds off any surface it touches, and the only input is sideways movement. Each stage is a chain of rooms linked by doors, with the way off the ship sitting in the final room.

🌀 A Stage, Start to Exit

1. Choose a stage from the menu; five are open from the first launch.
2. Steer left and right with the arrow keys (A and D work too) and let the bounce lift you.
3. Take a door with the up arrow or W to travel deeper into the ship.
4. Harvest stars as you cross; a full set for a stage earns a bonus message.
5. Touch a checkpoint so a later mistake costs one room rather than the whole run.

🧰 Fixtures Worth Knowing

• Key switches erase nearby padlocked blocks.
• Tilting platforms lean toward whichever side the moon rests on.
• Crates shove and stack, which is how high ledges get reached.
• Spring platforms bank energy with every bounce, and a dial on each shows the charge.
• Pipes ferry you across a room.
• Checkpoint posts light when touched.

🪐 Star Gates and the Rescue Stages

The level menu tallies every star you own, and the last five stages stay shut until it is big enough: 600 for stage 6, then 750, 900, 1050 and 1200. Those five are escorts rather than simple crossings — a captive planet has to be walked to the escape hatch, and each one travels in its own way.

• Mars, stage 6.
• Saturn, stage 7, ringed and blank-faced.
• The Lost Moons, stage 8, moving as a crowd.
• Mercury, stage 9, a burning roller with a toothy grin.
• The Sun, stage 10, mustached and last to be freed.

💡 Practical Tips

• Two head hits. The first bounce shatters a mouse's helmet, the second removes the mouse.
• Mind the puddles. Melted cheese pooling in a room's lower corners is as lethal as the spikes.
• Stack the spring. Several bounces load it enough to reach the top of a room.
• R restarts a stage the moment a star run falls apart.
• Backtrack for stars. Early stages are the cheapest place to top up the gate total.