I think what surprises me the most about Gimmick is just how fair it mostly is. There are a handful of cheap moments that will initially catch you off guard. However, not only are these parts few and far between, but the game is meant to be replayed. It's relatively short for an NES game, and there are many secrets and techniques that can only be discovered through repeat playthroughs. The few cheap shots become speed bumps. Moments that seem like pure chance turn out to have technique. At first, I felt the star mechanic was cumbersome and the bosses unfair, but replaying the game helped me appreciate its design a lot more.

The mileage the developers got out of the star mechanic is truly impressive. There's a unique strategy to each enemy and boss, and discovering them was gratifying. In general, the game is gratifying to play, as it rewards your problem-solving and experimentation. If you want to try to appreciate this game, please do not watch videos or quit after a few game overs. Set aside a couple of hours, go in blind, and anticipate that your curiosity will be rewarded.

That last point about curiosity pertains specifically to hidden collectibles you need to locate for the good ending (there's one in each level). The location of most of these, unfortunately, is something I was spoiled on. It's hard for me to say how many of them I could've discovered on my own, but I feel pretty much all of them can be found through intuition and thinking a little outside the box.

I have to commend the levels' sense of progression and novelty. Each of them contain multiple sections with unique enemies and artwork. The presentation is, in general, fantastic. Gimmick feels more like a homebrew or indie game than it does an officially licensed NES game. It's amazing just how close Gimmick is to modern indie game sensibilities. The animations can be very smooth, the characters are expressive in both their animations and behavior, the artwork and soundtrack are consistently great, and the sound design's variety deserves particular praise. The game is expressive, detailed, reactive, and has a "surprise factor" that I haven't seen elsewhere in the NES' library. Admittedly, I haven't experienced many NES games myself, but I believe my point generally stands. You just have to see it for yourself.

However, I have a few criticisms that keep me from giving the game absolute praise. At the beginning, I referred to Gimmick as "mostly" fair, and that is because of one particular boss towards the end. It is more difficult than any boss both before and after it. I've only been able to defeat the first phase of this boss without taking any damage once, and I've only been able to stand a chance against the second phase with items stocked up. It's strange because the bosses of the next level are comparatively fair. Additionally, one prerequisite of the good ending is beating the game without using continues (I only discovered this information through the internet, I haven't gotten the good ending). I could somewhat overlook this if it weren't for the aforementioned boss. I'm going to be a bit charitable here, and assume that there are some techniques I haven't discovered, but it is a massive difficulty spike at the very least. Finally, I feel like the game's pacing is better when you ignore the hidden collectibles. I wish the rooms containing them served as shortcuts or something like that. The levels are already somewhat short, though, so maybe the rooms could instead lead you to an alternate path through the level. While ignoring the hidden collectibles improves the pacing, it also makes the game a bit less challenging.

With all that being said, I would absolutely recommend Gimmick. The problematic boss is a bit too much of a sore point, unfortunately, but otherwise it's a pretty great game. Just make sure to give it some time before passing judgement.

EDIT: So hours after posting this review, I got the good ending. I don't think it changes what I said but it was worth it.

A technical marvel that is completely fucking miserable to play.

I'll get this out of the way, first: Gimmick might be the most impressive game I have ever seen running on a Famicom. I legitimately do not know nor could I begin to understand how a game that's only a few hundred kilobytes managed to pack visuals this pretty, sounds this pleasing, and an actual fucking physics engine onto a cart that ran on a console manufactured in the year 1983. By rights, this should not exist. People everywhere seem to constantly express surprise that Gimmick isn't actually another one of those retro throwback indie games, and they're right to be shocked. This might be the game that sells me on how drastic of an upgrade the Famicom was to the consoles that came before it. The Atari 2600 isn't shit compared to this. I digress. The point to make is that Gimmick really ought to be celebrated as a feat of engineering in video games.

Regrettably, though, video games need to be played.

Looking at Gimmick is significantly more fun than actually interacting with Gimmick. Yumetaro slides around like he's wearing ice skates long before you get to the actual ice level. Emulating rudimentary physics on the Famicom is undoubtedly an impressive feat, but it's handled in way that only manages to frustrate: downward slopes have almost zero friction, so you slide down them too quickly; it takes an obscene amount of time for Yumetaro to stop moving after you stop holding the button; enemies can turn on a dime, with none of them under any obligation to bother observing something as petty as the fundamental forces of the universe.

I was tempted to write about how I'm done giving the time of day to "cruel games", but I think that's prescribing a design intent when that's not necessarily what's here. What I'm ultimately and actually annoyed with is the fact that it's impossible to intuit certain enemy patterns or placements, which is where that feeling of cruelty stems from. The archers in Stage 4 are probably the most obvious and most unfair example, where the only shot you have at dodging their arrows is if you have prior knowledge as to where they actually are; they love shooting you from off-screen, with one placed specifically to catch you at the arc of your jump as you come out from the top of a previous screen, and another waiting at the end of a hallway to snipe you with a projectile that is literally a single pixel thick and roughly the same shade as the background. It's trivial to deal with if you know that it's coming, but that's if you know that it's coming.

This is a pattern that continues consistently throughout the game, but reaches an apotheosis at the end of Stage 5. The stage boss here is a little orb guy in a cart that moves horizontally along the top of the screen, shooting lasers down at you. To hit him, you have to bounce your star off of the top of the conveyor belt on the left, or fling it from the top of the conveyor belt down and hope that it bounces up the way that you want it to. The star, following the laws of physics, cannot bounce higher than its initial, highest bounce; essentially, you have one chance to hit the boss with a conveyor belt ricochet every time he comes near, and if you whiff, you have to wait for him to go all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left again. After he takes three hits, he fires his lasers even faster. The lasers also explode when they hit the ground, so your only option is to weave between them in mid-air. After he takes the fourth hit, he shoots the lasers so quickly that it is literally impossible to weave through them. If he takes the fourth hit too close to the left side of the screen, you won't be able to charge up your star fast enough to throw it, guaranteeing that you take damage. The fifth hit takes him out, at which point a second boss walks out from stage right to fire homing missiles and Contra spread shots at you. There is an unspeakable darkness within whoever designed this fight. A joyous mind cannot conjure these tortures.

The only part of the game harder than this is getting the Stage 4 secret item that lets you fight the true final boss, where you have one chance to jump off of your star (it has collision) and into an above alcove. If you miss it, you drop down onto a checkpoint, and you can't go back to try again. You can game over and continue to restart the entire level, but using a continue clears the remaining three secret items from the prior three stages out of your collection. You need six secret items in total — one from each level — to go to the true final stage. You either make that jump on your first attempt, or you have to start the entire game over from scratch. Again, I want to call this cruel. I don't know what word would better apply.

It's disappointing, because this is a game that I really would have liked to love. I think Yumetaro's design is so ridiculously over-the-top cute that it loops back around to being funny, and that endears me to him. I think the fact that Sunsoft were able to make all of these pieces fit together on hardware as rudimentary as the Famicom is admirable. I just wish the act of playing it didn't feel like pulling teeth.

Can I fuck 🥺