A psychedelic platformer, you say? That’s the thrust of Canadian indie developer Queen Bee Games’ 2020 romp, a title with high levels of difficulty to match its disturbing imagery and frantic environments.
Make no mistake, this is no cutesy platformer. It’s for REAL MEN. The type of manly man blokes who play games on MAXIMUM DIFFICULT as they’re superior to everyone else on Earth. How does this translate into a game? With much colourful language.
One of Those Super Difficult Games in Spinch
Right, we covered this in detail on our recent Hollow Knight: Silksong review and how Team Cherry, its developer, focussed on extreme difficulty. How ridiculous to be so juvenile in your belief MAXIMUM DIFFICULTY makes you a “real gamer” that you make huge swathes of your game tedious.
It’s an ongoing issue of elitism some developers, and many gamers, subscribe to.
Spinch joins that world of gaming, with a punishing difficulty level that spices things up with the lunacy of its artistic style (provided by Canadian cartoonist Jesse Jacobs). It’s cutesy, but mildly disturbing. Like taking a trip into a wonderland with two broken legs and seeing how you get on.
Players take control of Spinch, a white blob organism thing, and you enter a berserk world on a quest to save his/her/its children. That’s the general gameplay loop, one of saving white blobs, navigating the absurd world you’re in, and trying not to get a headache.
It’s a good game, but far from perfect. The difficulty across the game, artificially made to be quite maddening at times, is just not something we enjoy very much in games. Some gamers do (and really get on their bloody high horse about it), but with Spinch it backfired a tad.
The game met with mixed gaming press feedback and gamer responses in Steam reviews as it is very much an acquired taste. Basically, if you liked influential indie game Super Meat Boy (2010), but always felt it should be set in an insane psychedelic world of flashing neon colours, then Spinch is for you.
There’s also a nuts soundtrack by Canadian composer James Kirkpatrick (who uses the moniker Thesis Sahib), which he created on modified Game Boys and various handmade instruments.
Boppy and good fun, then, although some of the core tracks take the music into grating, dirge levels of 8-bit era gaming. It didn’t need to be quite so faithful to the Game Boy era of music.
Still, it all makes Spinch a distinct time of it in the saturated platformer market.
Visually it sure stands out. Tonally it sure sounds out. And whilst the game’s difficulty undermines its full potential, the True Gamer bros of the world (perfect organism as they are whom be vastly superior to all around them) will enjoy gitting gud at it. For the rest of us inferior scumbags, a few difficulty modes would have been welcome.
Spinch’s Meditation Zone
Before the game launches in summer 2020, its publisher Akupara Games had musical artist James Kirkpatrick create the above Super Spectrum Device.
It’s a 45 minute meditation zone, basically, you can use to help you calm down after the game’s more annoying levels. Or you can just stare at this any time you want to Zen mode it and embrace the chill factor.
