I beat this game a few days ago, but put off finishing this post until now.

• Slime-san
  

  13 hours playtime

  28 of 85 achievements

This is a platformer. You have your standard left/right movement and jump ability, as well as a dash move (you can dash in any cardinal direction) and wall jumping, but you do NOT have a double-jump: if you jump from solid ground and dash once in mid-air, you can’t do either until you land again. That may not seem weird at first, but if you walk off a platform, that doesn’t count as a jump, meaning you can jump in mid-air afterward. Also, if you wall jump (or simply slide off of a wall), that doesn’t count as a jump, either, meaning you can once again jump in mid-air. Heck, you can even jump and dash down onto solid tiles, and even though that causes you to bounce, you’ll regain your jump and your dash, letting you do both right after bouncing! There’s even a specific X-shaped tile surrounded by a bubble in the free “Blackbird’s Kraken DLC” that causes you to stick to it, with the only way to get off being to push the jump button, but even though doing that causes you to go in an upward trajectory away from the tile, it doesn’t count as your jump, letting you jump again in mid-air. Oh, but a standard jump from a solid floor won’t let you jump again in mid-air. If you’re familiar with practically any other game that has double jumps, I don’t need to explain how this feels less like a deliberate decision and more like a bug they couldn’t fix and just decided to build the game around.

Oh, you can also hold down a button to become transparent, which slows everything but your clear-time and lets you pass through green NPCs and green fishnet tiles.

Speaking of the controls, the game has a weird relationship with physics. If you’re on the ground, pushing forward sends you forward at top speed and letting go of the forward button stops you immediately, which is responsive, but in the air, pushing forward has you start gaining forward momentum until you reach your top speed and letting go slows you down until you’re at a standstill. Normally, this is subtle enough that it doesn’t affect the game too much, but if you hit the top corner of a solid tile, you’ll bounce up, and all of this can make it surprisingly annoying to drop down a single-unit-wide hole: you’ll tap forward, move forward at top speed, then get over the hole at which point air physics kick in and you slow down, but then you’ll hit the top corner of the next tile before fully stopping and bounce onto it. It can also make it quite frustrating to drop down a single-unit-wide hole when there’s a hazard wall on the other side since all the same stuff happens except you die and have to retry that segment of the level over; luckily, this is only done for two of the optional collectibles. Ironically, all of this means it’s easier to jump and tap forward while in the air so that you’ll only move forward a little bit rather than have all that happen. Similarly, dashing horizontally while on the ground sends you forward at a fixed distance, but dashing horizontally in mid-air will send you further, especially while holding forward, and if you jump while dashing, you get so much momentum that you can only slow yourself down rather than change direction. All of this makes me appreciate the dashing in Mega Man X more: you hold the button to dash exactly the distance you want before letting go to stop immediately, and if you make a dash-jump, you still only move forward while holding forward, stopping whenever you let go of forward.

Most levels are composed of four rooms, each one screen large: reach the sign with the green arrow, and you’ll be sent to the next room (and get a checkpoint in the process); reach the sign with the face, and you beat the level. Each room has a meter right next to a red arrow: when the meter runs out, a hazardous wall will slide in from the direction the arrow points toward. Normally, this is used as a de facto time limit, but there are some levels that are built around platforms being pushed by the wall, with you having to ride them while avoiding enemies or other hazards.

Along with the standard levels, there are also specialty levels. Levels with a camera icon consist of one room, but it takes up multiple screens, with the camera scrolling either with you or automatically; aside from this, they’re not different from normal levels: they end with a face sign and have the standard hazard wall chasing you. Levels with a skull icon are boss stages; they’re all “avoid the waves of hazards until practically everything stops and you can aim for the weak point” type of bosses. They can sometimes scroll through a series of screens with level design, but when it’s time to counter”attack” the boss (or getting close to that time), the screen usually stops scrolling. Also, no camera stage and no boss stage (except one) has any checkpoints, so if you die, you can pause and manually select the “restart level” option to bring your timer back to zero, which almost guarantees you’ll get the trophy-clear-time when you first beat the level.

The last type of specialty level are water levels. These are effectively the same as normal levels, except the screens are flooded with water (as opposed to normal levels which usually only have pockets of floating water cubes, if any water at all). Being in water also alters the controls: you move slower, but have infinite dash and jump. That may not seem so bad on paper, but that’s all that changes with underwater controls. Compare this with something like Super Mario Bros. 3/Super Mario World where you also went up in water by jumping, but you could push jump a bunch in rapid succession to rise faster or hold down and push jump to rise only a little bit. In this game, pushing jump has you go up slowly, but you also won’t stop going up until you reach the top of your jump arc (this game won’t let you do partial jumps, even out of water). You can also dash, which is faster, but you also can’t to partial dashes, and dashing into solid tiles causes you to bounce (which is exaggerated due to the water physics, but can be cut-off with another dash). Even if you don’t hit anything, dashing still gives you some momentum afterward, like dashing in mid-air, except again it’s exaggerated.

I should also talk about the game’s graphical style: it only uses five colors for everything (white, green, red, blue, and dark blue). At first, this seems like a pretty good idea: everything in the background is blue, all hazards are red, everything green can be passed through by turning transparent (and green NPCs makes you bounce), and white denotes solid tiles; since everything is color-coded, players can easily tell what’s what from a glance. However, the game then tries to get complicated: each room in a level has an optional apple collectible (apples act as the game’s currency), but due to the limited palette, apples are also green; due to the limited palette and the lack of animation on the apples, this can sometimes make it hard to see where the apple is. There’s also one specific tile that won’t let you move across it (you have to jump to move forward), but this tile is mostly green with some white pixels even though you can’t go through it by turning transparent. There’s also one particular tile that’s entirely made of white and transparent pixels, but this one triggers ice physics while moving across it, even though it doesn’t look that different from nearly every other tile with white and transparent pixels (which are just normal solid tiles that are decorated differently). The game also likes to have background details that are white (and sometimes green, like how you cover solid tiles with green slime when you touch them), though these aren’t so bad since they’re not too tall and are attached to solid tiles. The game also has foreground tiles, which also isn’t so bad when it’s only one tile and is only used to hide secret rooms, but there’s at least one room where the foreground can obscure hazards:

And that doesn’t even mention how the final world in the main campaign has red and green decorations within the solid tiles.

Something I feel I should bring up is that it doesn’t really have much of a difficulty curve. Sure, world 1 is easy, and world 2 is harder than world 1, but world 3 and 4 (and even the final world (world 5), to an extent) kinda blur together with world 2. It kinda reminded me of Celeste: both games have a stagnant difficulty curve (with most of the difficulty spikes being a result of trying to get one of the optional fruit collectibles) and choose instead to focus on continually introducing new things to try to keep players engaged. Heck, both games even introduce the auto-firing DKC barrels in a way that will likely get new players killed. The only thing that could’ve made this even more of a coincidence is if the protagonist of this game had a panic attack at some point, but luckily, all of the tedious mini-games in this game are completely optional to the main campaign (you only need to play them if you want to get all of the apples). With that said, I think this game is a bit better designed than Celeste since this game regularly tries to combine the new things with the old ones (changing them from gimmicks to proper features) as opposed to Celeste’s “slash and burn” approach. Even enemies that get introduced halfway through the final world will show up in the “DLC” campaigns being used in slightly different ways (though the DLC campaigns aren’t immune to introducing new things, either), and world 5 does manage to be a bit more challenging than the last three worlds at times. This game is also $5 cheaper at it’s base price, so there’s another point in its favor.

As for the individual features themselves, there are a couple cases where the introduction could’ve been done in a way that lets the player see how the enemies work before being put in danger (like with the ghosts and the DKC barrels), but they’re implemented fairly well for the most part. Others, like the laser beams, are often just used to make the player wait (since the lasers move slow when spawned but extend from one solid tile to the next and disappear instantly when their pattern is over and also have different timings from different lasers). However, the only one that really got on my nerves was the bomb enemies. If you get close enough, they chase you, which is okay, but if they get too close, they explode (expanding their hitbox by a sizable amount), and the only way to avoid this is to dash away the instant it happens, and this is an extremely small window of time (even if you’re using the time-slowing move, you still need to react quickly). Now, that’s one thing, but there are several times where you’re placed in a small hallway with bomb enemies blocking you, and the only way to get past is to trigger their explosions, with one level having nothing but bombs in narrow hallways; not only is triggering a bomb and living one of, if not the hardest thing to do in the game, but it’s also fairly repetitive since that’s pretty much the only thing the game makes you do when encountering a red bomb in the level. I feel like stating once again that even kaizo-hack designers look down on this kind of repetition (scroll to “C. Artificial difficulty vs. fun difficulty”).

But then you get to the “DLC” campaigns, and this is where the introductions turn into gimmicks due to their limited use. The Kraken DLC has a bigger focus on water levels, but it should’ve stayed at that rather than introducing a submarine that only shows up for, like, four levels in total, which has a bit of momentum when you let go of the D-pad, and whose torpedos not only spawn at a standstill and increase speed slowly, but also spawn at the very bottom of the sub, usually resulting in hitting the block right below your sub rather than the one in front of you, making the parts where you need to destroy a series of walls made of destructible tiles take even longer than necessary. At least the boss that was built around the sub’s mechanics was kinda neat.

However, the Sheeple DLC is where the game really starts to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of introducing new gimmicks. Not only are there completely dark, foggy levels where you can only see what’s being spotlighted (and the spotlight moves on its own rather than follow you), not only are there tiles that look exactly the same as solid tiles but slide away when you get near them, but there are levels made entirely out of completely invisible tiles, and the only way you can tell what’s where most of the time is by blind jumps. That’s the whole reason I hid giveaways for Ink, and now this game is doing the same thing but worse! I’m glad none of those show up in the rest of the game. The one good thing this DLC does is reskin the apples as scarabs, which makes them much easier to see at a glance.

EDIT: the fog levels might be introduced in the Kraken DLC, not this one. They still suck, though.

With that said, those bad decisions only show up on one route of that DLC. There are two other paths, where you play as two other characters (but neither are ones you can buy from the character shop). The first is basically the same, but changes color between red and green when you dash: green is standard, but red means green kills you and red can be passed while transparent. Because of this, the game has to introduce a new color to act as a universal hazard: orange. Nevermind the fact that it’s just an orange square with a Droste effect of squares as its decoration; you can tell it’s a hazard because why else would the game introduce a new color right at the moment you get the ability to be immune to red? This character also has the ability to kill enemies by dashing into them, and while that might seem beneficial at first, the game still frequently requires you to bounce on enemies to reach the goal, so it’s really more of a hindrance since you’ll likely kill a necessary enemy by accident and be forced to kill yourself.

The other character is a ball: not only is standard movement heavily-momentum based, but instead of dashing, you have an acceleration button; hold it to speed up and climb walls. I already have a pet peeve for platformers that add momentum to jumps, let alone all movement, but this one’s worse because if you jump after accelerating, you can’t control your trajectory, or even adjust it a little bit. This is compounded by the fact that you’ll need to do accelerated jumps quite frequently when you play as this character.

The boss of this DLC is fairly unique in that it actually has checkpoints: the starting room has three paths, with each one leading to a different character’s boss, and you get a checkpoint after defeating each one. For the main character, you’re just collecting items as they fall while avoiding hazards that fall at the same speed; it’s actually one of the easier parts of the game. The color swapper finally gets to use the “dash to attack enemies” move in a beneficial way since that’s how you damage the boss; however, the boss has a shield active for most of the fight, so it’s still effectively another “avoid the waves of hazards until the boss lets you do the thing” fight. The ball once again manages to end up having a frustrating part, but mainly because the game introduces yet another gimmick, and it only shows up for this boss: a conveyor belt. It’s pushing you to the left while the boss comes at you slowly from the right, and it’s up to you to figure out that holding the acceleration button while on the conveyor pushes the boss back (and that there’s an invisible wall shortly after the button that triggers the projectiles you use to attack the boss).

The final campaign is the “Superslime” levels: a set of 10 levels where you play as a different character in each of them. This ends up having the hardest levels in the game, but this is partly due to the game not giving you much quarter to get used to the new physics if you haven’t already bought and experimented with them in the other campaigns; for example, there’s a character who can double-jump, but can’t dash, and the first thing you have to do as the double-jump character is jump through a one-unit-tall gap in a hazard-wall: a single jump won’t get you past it, but a double jump will also send you into the ceiling, meaning you have to time it just right to get through, then repeat the process about two more times to see the rest of the level. You also have another level as the ball, only this level also has you deal with a bomb (which are finicky enough to deal with as the main character). Speaking of bombs, one of the levels has you ride a block being pushed by the hazard-wall-time-limit, so there’s even less room than normal to trigger their explosions safely. The sub makes one final appearance here, though that level ends up being really easy. Beyond the constant character switching, this campaign is distinguished from the others due to the fact that there are no optional collectibles (apples/scarabs/etc.) and also no boss.

Overall, this game is okay. It certainly does a lot of things right, but it also has enough annoyances that I’m hesitant to give it my full recommendation. If you’re a fan of platformers, maybe get it on sale.

P.S. At the time of this writing, the Kraken DLC has two levels that have a coin silhouette. If you enter the secret room in those two levels, there’s no coin. I looked it up, and the bug is not that there’s no coin, but that the silhouette shows up in the first place (the secret rooms in the DLC campaigns are only for the extra NPCs and their dialogues).