A visually and mechanically fantastic platformer that unfortunately ends too quickly. All in all I had a great time with Pepper Grinder. From the music to visuals , being art style and character design. The art style reminds me of almost a pixelated adventure time , cute , charming and recognisable. This is also true for the level design , you can see exactly which part of the scenery will react in a certain way to your oversized pepper grinder.
The game starts with the main character waking up on a beach, finds a huge drill and you gain control. That’s it, that’s the only story you get apart from the very end boss. Which leads me to the one noticeable negative. Lack of a story, that being said you can see things appear in the levels and the backgrounds that fill you in on the world. Just not as much to hint at why our character is even there.
So the premise of the game is simple at heart, its a platformer that uses a comically large drill bit to traverse every level. Of course as the levels go on , the game throws in more mechanics, types of terrain and several types of enemies. Through out each level very are coins to collect, vases to break and secret passages to find. There are two currencies in the game , coins which you find every where, but have close to nothing to do with and then you have Doubloons of which there are 5 hidden in every level. With these you can buy a golden key for 10 to unlock a secret level in every world, or you can use them to unlock different hair and cape colours for your character. Finding these is fun and luckily they appear on your HUD in order, so you can see roughly where you missed that one sneaky spot.
Every secret level was unique , every world had a new awesome design and implemented exciting mechanics. The difficulty rose up at a good pace, and at this point I need to mention, this is a controller game. The movement is fluid , never had an issue with it and the button layout is simply intuitive. Back to the difficulty , it was paced very nicely , as soon as I got one mechanic perfected , the game threw another. at the end of every world , roughly 5-7 levels you will get to a boss. All of them have awesome designs and once again they all have a unique mechanic to defeat it that go hand in hand with whatever you dealt with in the levels leading up to it. Although there was one level, the second to last level in the game that really tested my skills and I must say I spent more time on it than any boss fight before that
It’s a real shame that the game is this short, took me just under 4 hours to complete every level and that with taking my time to collect as many secrets as I can. How ever the game gives you a time attack option if you decide to replay a level. At last there are stickers you can buy from each worlds shop keeper a long side sticker pages which act as backgrounds. They don’t really do anything but let you create your own screenshots with quite a few tools at your disposal.
I want to keep this review short, as this game is definitely worth the little time it offers. As to the price it may be a little too much for 4 hours of gameplay at £12.72 / roughly $14 on steam. But if you have the money to spare or see the game on sale I would highly recommend experiencing what this title has to offer.
The game is available on steam and Nintendo switch 28 March 2024
