While not the first Nitrome game I played, nor the one that drew me to the site in the first place, this was the first game to really hook me in (pun unintended). While Space Hopper hadn’t held my interest, this one had: leading seven-year-old me to spend his entire period in the computer lab trying to get as far as he could, eventually compelling him to play the other games on the site: both within the (much, much smaller) backlog at the time, and actively awaiting for new games to release so I could play those as well. Sixteen (fuck I’m old) years later… this holds up! While I didn’t particularly remember anything about the level design — the little snapshots in my head all seemed to be from this game’s sequel, actually — I was surprised to find that playing this again did unearth some memories, my brain in particular adding the exact same mental lyrics to the background music as I did when I was seven years old. I don’t think this was exactly the exact nostalgic experience I was particularly expecting — I think I’d have to reach 2008’s output to really get the ‘oh my god this was the thing I used to play while I was a Childe!’ brainworms — but it was neat to revisit this.

Speaking of the game itself, though, it… almost feels kind of like a spiritual successor to Feed Me than anything else. You’re a mountain climber, rather than a venus fly trap, but the core gameplay feels quite similar, in that it’s a platformer where your main ‘tool’ allows you to click on a platform to propel yourself towards it, with most platforming challenges requiring quick and skilful use of your grappling hook, and most enemies differ in how they happen to interface with it. While it starts simple, it gets surprisingly involved, with later levels having individual sections longer than earlier whole levels, and with some particular setpieces being enough to give me a game over all on their own. It’s finicky, in places (which, sidenote, do not play the HTML5 version of this, literally you cannot collect extra health or lives) and perhaps a bit bare mechanically, but I’d still say this is fairly solid: if you’re looking for something to take 30-45 minutes of your time, and you don’t know anything else in this dev’s catalogue — like I had, so many years ago — you can’t really go wrong with this as a first choice. God knows it managed to hook me in.