A lost platformer from the original Gameboy with a focus on collectables and secrets. Initially I found this to be great, playing somewhere between Donkey Kong Country and Wario Land - however as time went on I found myself souring to both the weirdly incoherent world design and the core platforming. A large part of this was due to the literal framing of the action - the game feels far too zoomed-in for the type of game this is - meaning complex jumps are harder than they need to be and collectables are obscured just because you can't see that at the bottom of a hole there is a ledge.

I finished the main set of levels, and a large chunk of the secret content, but the bulk of this game is hidden behind layers that the majority of players, myself included, wont ever experience. This is a bit of a shame, as I suspect the more interesting levels are obscured in this way, but ultimately the core gameplay was not strong enough for me to put in the required effort to find out.

This one was really frustrating to play. I ended up really enjoying and appreciating what Colorgrave achieved with their previous title, Prodigal, and I'm not a 2D zelda guy! But I am a 2d platformer guy and I wouldn't have thought Colourgrave never made one before with how smooth and technical the moveset of Belle and Chime is. And they better married the aesthetic to the more meandering slice of life elements. Prodigal looked fine if somewhat generic but Curse Crackers commits to pastel blues, whites and pinks that make it snug and pleasant to play. There's so much to appreciate but unfortunately Curse Crackers embraces the my pet peeve as far as 2D platformers go: collectibles. Instead of designing stages that would make the nuanced verbset of Belle and Chime sing, they are instead stuffed with 'secrets' that never amount to anything more than hugging and hitting every wall for an invisible entrance. Although the last couple of worlds do offer some thrilling gauntlets, the levels in this game never amount to more than indistinct and shapeless stop and start affairs. And they're all stitched together by a large yet mostly barren SMW-styleworld map that only ever served to disperse the little community whose interactions I got the most enjoyment out of in contrast to Prodigal's compact little burg tying its inhabitants together. The fact that a lot of the cozy slice of life and post game content is tied behind completion nearly poisoned the well for me. I was relaxed and content while playing Prodigal but I was never able to get into a similar sweet spot with Curse Crackers. The ingredients were there but what they cooked was not to my taste. This one was disappointing.

Very underappreciated platformer with a genuinely all-timer movement system and solid levels. The world map is surprisingly in-depth with side quests, towns & hidden areas. In general, the game has tons of content and will last you for longer than you would expect for this type of game. The sprites look great, and the chosen colour palette is very unique, favouring lots of pink & yellow tones.

Unfortunately, it gets worse as it goes along, with less open-ended levels and fewer of the fun NPC interactions, but still worth seeing through to the end. The game is also unnecessarily obtuse with some of its secrets, particularly in the postgame. Walkthroughs are currently scant, so it was a pain finding some of these.

I started off really liking this game. I was drawn in by the art style at first. This is one of those games where, for the most part, simply moving around is fun. Playing as an acrobat character adds some interesting movement tools to your kit that let you move around levels really fast. Sadly for me, I only found about half of the levels in the game to be fun to run through. The first two worlds I played through were really fun and well designed but as I progressed further into the game, the quality of the levels drastically decreased. Levels in the swamp and the library specifically were either boring or difficult for the wrong reasons. Levels can feel very cramped at times, limited your otherwise very fun movement. There is just too much on screen at once sometimes. The levels have a lot of replay value to them, but once I got about halfway through the story, replaying levels was the last thing I wanted to do. The world and characters are fun enough, and there are side quests that offer a nice distraction. I found it difficult to keep track of all of the stuff to do in the quests though, sometimes and ended up accidentally progressing them when talking to random characters on a whim. I did eventually find an option tucked away in the last page of the menu that shows you what areas to go to for quests, but that should have been on by default in my opinion. There seems to be a lot more for me to do after completing the main story, but honestly, I don't really want to. The story itself had a satisfying conclusion, and I'm not really dying to jump into more frustratingly designed levels. I'm really torn on this game, which is why I'm even writing this much in the first place. It probably seems like my criticisms outweigh the positive points I made about this game, but I really did have a lot of fun in the first half. The last world of the game's story was also a great one, and its aesthetic and story implications really surprised me too.