Here’s a real gem of a game! Platformance: Castle Pain revels in how old school and punishing it is. See it’s deceivingly simple, and honestly the easier difficulties don’t prove to be much of a challenge at all. But once you crank up the difficulty, it becomes a gauntlet of countless deaths and infinite frustration. And it’s glorious.
This is a platformer in its purest possible form. You don’t attack, you simply jump and move. There are no real enemies, just obstacles that you can do nothing against other than dodge. Traps, fires, spikes, moving stones, more spikes, axes and even ghosts attempt to hinder your way through the castle to your prize of a princess. It’s beautiful really, technically and graphically speaking. It’s not an advanced game rather embracing its old school nature, which I find a lot of Indie games tend to do, but that is in no way a negative thing!
When the game starts it shows you the whole level, the entirety of it. The game only has this one level however, and at first this may come across as way too simple. Start playing though and you realize just how devious the designers are. Again, play on the easier difficulties and anyone with even the most rudimentary of platforming skills will easier conquer the game, but that kind of defeats the purpose, aside from a warm-up run to get used to the layout.
As you tackle the harder versions of the stage you quickly realize how true the subtle is. Dying in an almost constant stream due to almost bullshit tricks, but it’s designed well enough that whenever you die you know, deep down, it’s your own fault. And that’s a good thing. When a game keeps killing you because of something either inherently broken, or just poorly designed it quickly wears on you. But when it’s your own fault it pushes you to try harder, to finally overcome your own short comings as opposed to having to deal with the games own failings. It was a difficult go, but it was satisfying once you finally make it all the way through.
Aside from the beautiful game play bits, the game itself is really a joy to look at. There’s a pretty surprising amount of level diversity considering its just one big level. It doesn’t all take place in castle halls, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. The character and objects sprites are well designed, all fitting together well and though there is very minimal animation involved it works really well. With the nice simple look it forces the game and the player to focus more on the game play, and that’s all that really matters with a game like this.
I really wish I had more to say about this game. I mean, I really enjoyed it, but due to the nature of the beast there just isn’t a whole lot to talk about. This is most definitely a good game, and if you’re a fan of old fashioned platformers then by all means hurry up and plunk down the dollar for this game. You won’t play it for too terribly long, but your time with it will be sweet, and it might be worth a look at in the future at some point. Maybe suggest a friend plays it to laugh at their misery?
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