Blair Loveday
Devolver Digital seems to find some of the best indie games to publish, that’s why when Pepper Grinder popped up on my radar, it immediately rose to the top of my wishlist.
Now I have played it, I can confirm it’s yet another hit!
Pepper Grinder has our main character Pepper who washes up on land with her treasure. It is quickly pinched and as a fan of treasure, she goes after it. That’s about the extent of the story and I am perfectly happy with that as it’s the gameplay you are here for.
When it comes to said gameplay, the game is a 2d platformer with a twist.
The twist is that Pepper has a giant drill to grind through rocks. Hence the Pepper Grinder name.
Anyway, there are areas you can drill through which propels Pepper forward. Very quickly you find yourself having to jump to a wall, grind through it, and then jump out the other end. It’s so damn fluent and so fun. You can also press a button to rocket out the other side of the rock which is needed to get some sweet air in some puzzles.
The game doesn’t want you to get complacent though.
It progressively adds mechanics that make the grinding platforming action harder. There is a lot of fun in the discovery, so I will only spoil one early one which is a grapple point which you can spin around. These can be as easy as swinging from grapple point to grapple point, but gets harder when you need to grind through a rock, immediately grapple, and then grind through the next spot of rock before you fall to your death. It can be really hard to get your rhythm, but when you get it the game is oh so smooth.
Each area of the game has a bunch of platforming levels, followed by a boss.
Bosses are very cleverly designed, and the game doesn’t walk you through how to beat them, so I won’t ruin heaps of them here.
Instead I will use the early boss to explain how great these are. You have an enemy who is riding a giant beetle. The beetle will walk back and forth and eventually walk up the walls at which point you need to be grinding under it to slam into the beetle’s belly. Doing this knocks the enemy off and you need to hit him with your grinder.
A few phases of this isn’t too easy, especially as the boss’s gun gets much more powerful and your life bar starts to feel incredibly limited. It took me more turns than I want to admit to get through the first boss, but when I got it I was so damn happy.
The game has a stunning pixelated style that absolutely pops. Each area has its own backdrop and they have been designed to absolute perfection. There were the odd issues like an early lava waterfall section that I thought was just a background in a vertical section, until I went to jump past it and got burned alive by the lava. This is minor as hell though as the game looks so damn incredible.
Pepper Grinder is an incredibly fun and incredibly creative platformer. If you want something stressful but fun to play on your Switch, you’d be silly to look past this gem.
It kicked my ass plenty, but it always felt fair as I had to just get my rhythm or actions right to nail a section I was struggling with
Released: March 2024
Rating: PG
Platforms reviewed: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Platformer
Developer: Ahr Ech
Publisher: Devolver Digital