Connor
I am a blue haired pixel animated land shark in the form of a cute girl with a drill the size of my own entire body and a magpie’s desire for shiny objects.
It’s not a phase mum.
Pepper Grinder, the latest from Devolver Digital, is a 2D side scroller platformer with emphasis on momentum, timing and puzzle solving.
We are introduced to Pepper as she is washed up from a shipwreck and being robbed by a mysterious masked woman and her entourage of cackling horned Narlings.
From there on in it’s up to us to don Grinder, our massive hand drill, and dive, jump and collect our way to vengeance and riches.
Other characters so far include an innocent badger whose house and turnips we ransack and eat respectively; and a fifty story tall blue cyclopean giant marching by in the background of the first level.
It is a mysterious world we inhabit, presented to us with no dialogue and little more than implied reasons for who we are and why we are here.
But for a pixel art side scroller, a certain degree of minimalism is not only expected, it is almost demanded.
Games of this type are a play on nostalgia, a throwback to the days of Metroid and Castlevania when the most that could be determined from the look of a pixelated sprite was if that guy had long hair or not.
Let’s take a closer look.
Difficulty wise, the term ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ comes to mind, but I don’t believe that applies here when there are a grand total of six buttons to press and five of them are movement related.
More aptly I would say Pepper Grinder is a skateboard that seems simple enough to ride right until someone wishes you luck and pushes you off a cliff.
Then it’s time to sink or swim.
So you go from diving and leaping through the environment with the grace of a dolphin, occasionally reminding some little narwhal demon looking fella who the boss is down here, to screaming through a gauntlet laden with bombs, deadly thorns and death defying leaps.
Your movement through the ground is controlled in the same way you control a rampaging elephant and for all the simplicity of the controls, it’s easy to find yourself flying into another bottomless pit… especially if you are aiming to collect everything.
For you see, difficulty in Pepper Grinder comes in two levels.
If your only care is to get to the end of the level, you are going to have little problem; your path of progression is fairly obvious and the puzzles are fairly straightforward.
If, like me, you have an obsessive need to collect everything that shines between yourself and the exit gate, then welcome to hell.
You have condemned yourself to dying over and over, returning to the last checkpoint to hunt down that one little gem you missed on that last almost perfect run.
To get the perfect run though, you will need to examine the walls very closely. For no game like this is complete without its secret areas and the designers of Pepper Grinder understood this well.
Slight changes in texture mark the hidden points where you can drill the walls for hidden coins and there are several to find in each level.
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before.
Sound wise Pepper Grinder excels.
The menu greeted me with the aggressive revving of a chainsaw followed immediately by the fast beats of a techno track that had my feet tapping without me even really noticing.
This drops you into the flowing waves of the starter area with a lonely western background instrumental establishing the mood for the beginning of your journey.
Finding success in simplicity as with much of the game, sound design is careful and deliberate. The impish cackling of your enemies, the huffs of exertion whenever Pepper does something particularly impressive, the industrial drone of the drill that is your only tool and weapon in a hostile landscape.
Pepper Grinder isn’t setting out to be the next big thing, it knows what it is and sticks to it, staying well within its lane. That can rapidly get old for some people now used to expecting a game to include a constant dopamine feed of progression, but if all you are looking for is a quick and fun way to spend a few hours of your time, here’s your stop.
In that sense, Pepper Grinder is like your favourite chair. It does its job very well and you will be comfortable and satisfied while sitting in it.
You won’t be thinking of it after getting up and moving on to the next thing, but that’s OK. It will still be there waiting for you when you get back.