“Extremely satisfying and dynamic”, this crazy platform game will be one of the sensations of 2024!

Game news “Extremely satisfying and dynamic”, this crazy platform game will be one of the sensations of 2024!

If I tell you”Play a young heroine with blue hair and travel the world using your drill“, does it make you jealous ? Well that’s the next concept Pepper GrinderA demo of which I was able to test during the Steam Neo Fest. More precisely, it is Action-Platformer In 2D – a 2D Mario-style world map with levels – which offers gameplay quite different from other titles in the genre. All this is accompanied by excellent art direction. In short, I loved it.

A gameplay that is as nervous as it is pleasant

Yes, the drill isn’t necessarily the most attractive tool out there, but developer Ahr Ech has managed to make the machine very interesting. Thanks to him, our heroine Pepper can overcome all the destructive materials that block her path

. You can pass sand, mud and even swim. Additionally, and this is the first thing that struck me, the gameplay is extremely satisfying and dynamic. Every movement has almost perfect fluidity. But if you think that a grinder (yes, a drill has a name) is only for drilling, you are way off base. Thanks to it, you can access normally inaccessible places, collect rubies, activate all kinds of mechanisms and even find secret places..

Grinders are also our main assets in battles. We can choose to rush into the pile piercing all our enemies or choose a safer approach. But know one thing: not all opponents are easy to defeat. Some, like the red crabs you encounter at the beginning, are invulnerable if you attack them. Then you have to drill down into the earth beneath their little feet. In short, action and reflexes blend very well here in this app, which still has some tasty things in store.

like Mario Or other platform games, the levels here have many things. Thus we have numerous crystals of all colors plus gold coins marked with skulls to collect. I must admit that my perfectionist soul forced me to redo the three levels available in the demo, in order to recover all these collectables, even if the coins “the skull” Sometimes hard to find. This allows us to recover images in a small store, for the pure joy of collecting. Crystals, for their part, allow us to regenerate our life bar. So the goal of the title is to complete each level, collecting all the available items, until the black flag is raised at the end of the race, synonymous with victory.

A neat DA that makes up for some minor issues

But it’s not just the gameplay that I liked: the art direction is also a strong point of the game. On one hand, the 2D graphics are polished, the pixel art is masterful and above all, the color selection is absolutely flawless. This may sound trivial, but the game is as colorful as possible which gives the title an ultra-magical aspect and, in my case, allows me to completely escape.. Not forgetting the soundtrack, but very neat. Whether it’s the hyper-nervous electro theme song or the soothing main theme, all the music is perfectly chosen.

however, Pepper Grinder Suffers from some minor issues, which however do not spoil the gaming experience. The most minimal drawback is related to the view. There is simply no plot or story premise (we wash up on the beach and we’re gone). But where the problem lies is the rather repetitive aspect of the three layers present here. Of course, there are elements that change, especially in terms of obstacles (brambles in level 2, bombs and doors in level 3), but I still had the feeling of following the same path with three people. Time. I encountered the same monsters, the same stuff to drill, and the same hidden room mechanics. However, this is just a demo and we hope that the full game will be updated as it should be. It is planned for 2024 (without further details) on PC and Switch.