I honestly wanted to like this more than I did. I don't think having Sonic Mania in my mind as the studio's last game helped. I don't find the character designs very appealing, and there weren't really any cool and memorable "moments" in the game that blew me away. I had a lot of frustrations with the character not moving the way I want to as well.

I feel like my expectations were out of sync with what the game actually is, which caused a bit of friction. The game gives off heavy mario vibes with sprinkles of sonic on first impression, and so I expected the controls to be tight and frictionless. Instead, it's a game that expects you to learn how to time your inputs correctly for optimal execution, all while doing tony hawk style combos. I didn't really vibe with that for many hours, but by the end of the game I was feeling more okay with it.

Other than that, there's a lot to like here. Fun concepts, GREAT music, really cool art direction, some good level design. Not a bad game at all, and I'll probably re-play it again at some point.

this had the potential to be one of my favourite platformers of all time, but there were a few things that did kinda put a damper on my enjoyment a bit.

the movement and controls in this game are a little tricky at first but once you've figured it out, it's extremely satisfying to chain moves together and increase your combo score whilst also keeping your momentum at the same time. i think at first some more casual players might be turned away from it but it's definitely worth sticking to as it's super fun once you've nailed it! the level design is also pretty superb, complementing the move set very well! one small thing is that it is kinda easy to fly past a lot of the obstacles but i think it's still fun to do if you're chaining together moves.

my biggest issue with this game is how buggy it is. i lost count of how many times i clipped through the ground, got stuck in the ground, had the camera freak out or had penny's yoyo get stuck to things with no way to detach it. a lot of these bugs caused unnecessary deaths and even softlocked me at some points which is very frustrating.

another slight issue i had was a few of the bosses weren't really that fun to me but mostly because of bugs or jank. many of them have some really great ideas that fall flat due to bugs. one boss fight in particular (sheila) was incredibly buggy, it took me way more attempts than it should've to complete. if it wasn't the camera zooming out and going absolutely haywire for no reason, it was penny clipping through the boat, leading to death. very frustrating.

overall, this is still such a unique and enjoyable platformer that despite the bugs, i still love it! i can also see it being a TON of fun for speed runners and i can't wait to see what they're able to do with it! definitely recommend checking this out :)

Penny's Big Breakaway might have a great move set, and good level design - but there's seemingly no connection between the two. You can pretty much skip every meaningful obstacle by just launching yourself over it, as I'm not sure there is literally a single jump, at least in the main story, that requires you to even use all 3 moves before hitting the ground.

The presentation is somewhat charming, although the characters aren't exactly memorable, and the story feels like the Galaxy and beyond era of Mario - just some light goofy shenanigans to get to some new locations.

Penny's Big Breakaway is kind of fun, but not anything I plan on coming back to.

6/10
Game #26 of 2024, April 30th

Here is a game that is definitely for someone, but that someone just isn't me. Penny's Big Breakaway looked intriguing from trailers, and I'm not one to say no to a good 3D platformer so I bought it on release, played the first two worlds and realized quickly what a mistake I'd made.

You see, Penny's Big Breakaway is not your ordinary 3D platformer. It is a linear game where you go through stages with platforms and various obstacles, and you clear them by reaching the goal, but it's all about the combos and maintaining it throuhgout the stage to get a nice high score, and there is no game on earth that will ever make me care about my score, and especially not one that rewards me for playing well with a very small piece of artwork. "But you don't have to care about score to beat the stage, Sillen", and that's true, but the stages are so unbelievably boring (Penny's movement withou constant yo-yoing is so slow!!!) that the only real way to make them even a bit enjoyable is by comboing through, trying to get to the end as fast as possible, ignoring the pointless collectibles, not caring about the even more pointless side missions, and just overall engaging with as little as possible with whatever comes your way. Doesn't help either that there's only one track per world (and the soundtrack is of very mixed quality), or how each stage in a world uses the same basic theming so you get around four (some worlds thankfully fewer stages) stages in a row that look and sound the same, which unsurprisingly makes the experience kind of boring when you're not exactly in love with how the game plays.

When Penny's Big Breakaway clicks, it becomes more fun, and especially when the controls clicked as I also realized just exactly how pointless exploring for those collectibles or caring about the side missions whatsoever was, I was having a decent time just going through most stages and not really caring about anything other than looking decent while doing so, but I still wouldn't call the game good even from this point on. Some stages are more fun than others and I wasn't actively hating my life or anything, but I never stopped being annoyed by a lot of things the game did, like how much longer than needed most stages are, the garbage hit detection on power-ups, the inconsistent physics, phasing through walls, sometimes flinging myself off a platform when trying to do that spinning move to maintain a combo despite doing the exact same thing as all those times I managed to pull it off, the genuinely hall of fame boss fights in how bad they are, the sometimes straight-up evil camera, or how inputs would sometimes just be eaten.

I can see a great game in an iteration on Penny's Big Breakaway, even for someone like me who doesn't care about score or speedrunning, but this game was just too buggy when I played it, too focused on being a cool GDQ game that it forgot to also be fun as a more casual 3D platformer experience, which it obviously doesn't have to be, but it seems to be designed to also work as one one paper when you look at the stage design, and the pretty traditional obstacles you face, the gimmicky power-ups to spice things up here and there, but actually engaging with most of those without just flying past them and styling over those annoying penguin enemies makes for a very C or even D-tier platforming experience.

There's also something very unsettling about Penny's design, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I at least know it doesn't help that her face looks to be animated in Garry's Mod during the non-2D cutscenes.

This is a game made for speedrunners, and I mean that negatively. If you're someone who has the time and energy to perfect the movement and learn every little trick there is, I'm sure it's a blast. I'll probably love seeing speedruns of it at GDQ. If, however, you're a more casual player, you're probably going to find it okay at best, and a nightmare at worst.

The controls are far from intuitive. They lack responsiveness. They're slippery when you don't want them to be, stiff when they shouldn't be, and obtuse in a way that keeps the game from ever really being fun. And when you finish a level and see a score pathetically trying to fill up a bar, the game might as well laugh at you for moving so badly according to its arbitrary whims.

Hopefully they patch it up, too, because it's a bugged out mess, and not in a silly or avoidable way. It would eat my inputs, or completely refuse to acknowledge me trying to activate an ability. I fell through the same solid floor twice. In the middle of a platform. Why is there a hole there. When I'm barely enjoying your game as is, these things only exacerbate the problem.

There is something here that could have been really good. The art style is charming and vibrant. The soundtrack is way better than it has any right to be (seriously, go listen to it). When the movement is actually flowing and behaving as it seems it should, it's quite enjoyable. But it isn't enough to salvage the rest.

I was really excited for a new, stylish 3D platformer that wasn't just another Mario entry. Guess I'll have to keep waiting.

This was a mixed bag for me. When you're clicking with the controls, it's riveting to fly across the stage, but then there is a drawback. The controls can be slippery and sometimes you don't end up where you thought you would go or bug into a wall and have to restart from a checkpoint. The level design had variety and didn't overstay its welcome when it came to their gimmicks. The boss battles were hit and miss. The OST was great and I'll probably listen to that outside of the game in the future.

I only beat the main story. There are more levels, but after attempting one and the slippery controls, I was finding myself frustrated, which is something that happened quite often. I didn't realize until I beat the story there was an item shop which would have mitigated a few other issues I had, so perhaps I'll come back to this at some point. This was an honest effort that just needs a bit more tweaking, but has the potential to be great.

Increible plataformas en el sentido de Mario Odyssey, puedes atajar en la mayoria de niveles con la mecanica principal que envuelve el diseño de juego, yoyo, ampliable tambien para dar mas variabilidad al gameplay, aunque los nuevos poderes viven por encima el yoyo estándar al contrario de Cappy que adquiere nuevos sistemas completamente dispares al de Mario, esto crea un problema al jugardor (supongo que los devs tomaron esta decision por no alargar el desarrollo de juego) a la hora de adaptar los sistemas de Pennys a los nuevos complementos. yap yap
La música esta bien

Fun enough game. Unpolished areas of the presentation were a bit distracting (namely how shiny everything is), but the energetic, Dreamcast soundtrack more then made up for that.
Phasing through the ground is a bit harder to look past, but I think I'd be more bothered by that if I had the desire to perfect this game when it comes to time trials and score. Plus it only happened a handful of times.
Coins and boss fights felt like it was more of an obligation then anything. Really only one (maybe two) bosses had both interesting designs that made great use of the movement systems. Coins on the other hand are used for a shop that has some very menial effects, to the point that I didn't buy a single thing once. It's honestly not too great to have a prominent collectable feel boring to collect.
Really your here to speedrun through the many stages on offer, utilizing the momentum of your dashes and slopes so that your yo-yo ride ability can achieve some ludicrous speeds to skip large sections of the level. The many options you have while airborne can also allow for some clever shortcuts, whether it's simply dashing then comboing with a mid-air swing to fly over several platforms, to figuring out how to use a yo-yo bounce plus wall jump to reach heights that almost seem unintentional.

For what it is, I recommend you take your time your first time through, since mastering the physics won't be a quick learning process. Plus don't go in expecting a platforming masterpiece, it really isn't going for something grand or exceptional. Just sit back and enjoy the show for what it is rather then what it isn't.

Hearing that Penny's Big Breakaway were the Sonic Mania dev's take on a 3D platformer had me having a keen interest for a while. Evening Star prove they don't need to ride the coattails of a big IP to produce a banger.

The game is mostly comparable to Super Mario 3D world offering a linear fixed camera level layout with optional objectives and collectables found along levels. The gameplay is something of a mix between Mario Odyssey and Sonic, with Penny's Yoyo feeling like Cappy with the throw/swing/bounce combos you can do with it, and rolling on the yoyo feeling like Sonic in ball form. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it feels very free-flowy.

While I did enjoy the gameplay, it felt like it was missing something. Like it kinda felt sluggish a lot of times. The physics feel a bit too tight and could have benefited from loosening up a bit, embracing the looseness of Sonic Adventure and Mario 64, but the physics feel closer to Mario Galaxy. It hindered my enjoyment a bit when I wanted to zip through levels just to get a collectable I missed, but was hit with sort of a speed limit.

The visuals are amazing. I love the pastel Sega Saturn inspired worlds, and you can tell this was originally going to be some sort of classic Sonic inspired game before they made it into their own thing.

The music is mostly meh with some standout tracks.

There is a good amount of content here for a 3D platformer, and you will be spending a good chunk of time in this game if you intend to go for the 100%, which is the recommended way to play this game.

The most enjoyable part for me were the special levels which felt like Mario Sunshines secret levels. Here the gameplay shined the most to me, where it was still doable but a bit challenging, whereas standard levels were a bit too open and bit on the easy side. I think Penny's Big Breakaway would benefit more from having linear challenge based levels like Crash bandicoot, based on my enjoyment of the special levels.

Great game with a lot of potential, will be keeping my eye on more games by Evening Star knowing they have the dog in them to deliver us a 5 star platformer one day.

I've only played a few hours so far.
Whem this game was announced in the Nintendo Indies direct, I was intrigued. I'm not exactly convinced by the main character's design, especially in the artworks, but in-game, Penny is charming and controls well.

The level design so far blends platforming sections with wider areas you can speed through. It's up to you whether you want to chain tricks to go as fast as you can or take it a little bit slower to explore more and find secrets, even though it feels like the game is mainly made for the first reason. It is extremely satisfying to keep your momentum and breeze through the levels if you've mastered the movement.

One thing that still trips me up sometimes, though, is you have no control of the camera. Sometimes, I want to adjust the angle mid-jump to see a secret area better, but the right stick is used to throw your yo-yo and I end up falling to my death.

It is a lot of fun to play, though, and I'm curious to see what the gane still has to throw at me in the coming levels.

The problem with this game is that it has amazing controls and good level design. But the game is really easy, an artstyle thats makes me think this game was aimed at very young kids and no one else, a middling soundtrack that made me start listening to other songs part way through, and mid boss fights. The game is really only good at one thing. Also i fall through the floor every few levels. really disappointing from the team that made sonic mania I expected better. but god damn that gameplay is really good.

Penny's Big Breakaway commits to its vision very hard that it might push people away from it. Which I don't see as inherently bad, a game for everyone is a game for no one. I clicked with this game, I love how relatively demanding to chain moves while maintaining momentum and especially combos. I'm not saying that this game is some insurmountable cliff to play, but the learning curve is higher than what someone who just wants a casual jaunt through a cutesy world would expect. However, if you do get the hang of things, you will see how much this move set shines and how awesome you'll feel when maintaining a high combo. It's also a quite small set of moves but they flow into each and have purpose without making each other redundant.

I also really enjoyed the levels, nothing stood out to me as mind-blowingly memorably but nothing was bad. Although I did get frustrated during the space-looking world. Looked cool but my hairline went back a couple inches. Perhaps just a case of "mad-cuz-bad" but this was when I started encountering the jank. This game, at least at the time I played it, (patches seem to have tackled my problems), had a notable bugginess. Bugs weren’t common but they happened frequently enough to put a damper on things. I would fall into weird tumbles that would defy the laws of gravity and take away my control. I would have times where I don't ledge grab when I feel I should've and, on the flipside, I would grapple onto ledges but Penny would fail to pull herself up. A lot little issues that kept building up that took my enjoyment down a notch towards the ends of the game. I haven't jumped back into the game but I saw a patch note or two that mentioned fixes for the specific problems I ran into so you'll probably fare better than I did.

The aesthetics are very much up my alley. It gives me the same vibes of a Sega Saturn or Dreamcast game but with polished up visuals. It all feels like something Sega would make back in the day, which I guess makes sense since the devs are the Sonic Mania team. Although, I do have one major issue...

PENNY FOR GOD'S SAKE, KEEP THE DAMN HAT ON! No one wants to see your Founding Father looking-ass hair. Or maybe it's a wig, then that would change quite a lot. She would be one of three things, she's either high status, balding, or suffering from syphilis. Penny clearly isn't high status, she's just some nobody shlub street performer so that leaves us with the final two, balding or syphilis. Women typically don't go fully bald when suffering hair loss. Female pattern baldness is fairly common though. Penny isn't given an age but aesthetics and impressive acrobatic ability would suggest she is fairly young so age likely isn't a factor. The other two culprits of female pattern baldness would be issues regarding a particular hormone, dihydrotestosterone, and genetics. However, these are both things we can't really answer without more information on Penny herself.

That leaves us with one final possibility, syphilis. One symptom of syphilis when left untreated is baldness. During the late 16th century, syphilis became one of worst epidemics to strike Europe. Being bald during these times were considered "hella cringe" by the people of the era so wigs became the "solution" to hiding your syphilis since proper treatment didn't exist at the time. The wigs were also powdered to hide the stench of one's effectively decaying head. Powdered wigs became a sign of status during the mid-17th century when then King of France, Louis XIV, suffered from baldness. Louis wanted a bougie-ass wig and hired 48 wigmakers to save him from being considered some bald loser. Other nobility also followed in Louis XIV's footsteps and got themselves fancy powdered wigs to hide their decaying smelly heads. This led to an increase in wig prices making wigs a way to flaunt wealth and show status which is where the term bigwig originates from. Wigs also happened to be good for dealing with lice since it's easier to take off and boil a wig than delousing from hair attached to your head.

So, my theory is that Penny has severe syphilis which is why she wears both a wig and a hat to serve as a dual-layered shield against the eyes of the masses. She also probably purchased this style of wig with the pittance of money she makes being some no-name street-performer to appear as high class, to appear as a somebody...

Or maybe she just has a terrible taste in hairstyles.

this game is all about movement and the movement is super slick and i can FEEL that once you've honed it, it's a BLAST. full comboing stages and just flying around and skipping seems so fun, but you NEED to put the time in. it's not something you can pick up and master, and casually? i found a lot of the controls and movement to just... not feel great. maybe in a game drought i'd pick this up as a speed game and change my opinion, but right now it's just kinda okay with a lot of frustrating moments.

Not bad at all. A bit buggy and inconsistent with some of the controls, but also got much more fun as I got the hang of the controls. Building momentum and staying off the ground feels incredible, but losing that momentum due to something you hardly have any control over can be deflating.

I appreciate the commitment to the art style, regardless of the general opinion on it (I think it mostly looks great and separates itself from other games in the genre). Some of the cutscenes were a bit rough, and the style of them changing scene to scene was kind of distracting.

Really hope they can iron out some of the control issues either in an update or a sequel, because overall I had a great time with this game, and I think it deserves a bit more time spent on it.

Movement took some serious getting used to but once I did I realized just how much cool shit you can do in this game. However, even by the end there were some things that never quite felt consistently good (riding on the yoyo, jumping on the yoyo, stuff like that) and there's a fair bit of unpolished areas here. Still, a great time if you're willing to put in the effort.

Edit: fantastic soundtrack too. Tee Lopes is on it, that's a given I know but even other composers like Sean Bialo were COOKING

Penny's Big Breakaway is the debut title from Evening Star, a new studio formed from several developers who worked on Sonic Mania. I was a big fan of Mania, and was excited to see what a talented team could do without the constraints of the Sonic franchise. The game is a 3D platformer where you control Penny and her magic yo-yo as you progress through as series of levels. The control scheme reminds me slightly of Super Mario Odyssey, where the character uses an object to gain extra platforming moves, in this case riding on a wheel, performing a swinging move, and dashing forward. I've seen some complaints about the control scheme, but I actually found it pretty fluid and easy to grasp, although there were some moments where some moves just didn't seem to want to fire correctly -- the dash move in particular. Sadly, while I enjoyed the controls I don't have much positivity for the rest of the game. It's not a bad game by any means, but I found it very bland. Pretty much every level is exactly the same, and they all blend together. They reuse the same level design ideas over and over again, and there's no single level that really stood out to me. The levels do have some optional tasks for you to complete, but I'm not sure why anyone would actually do them. They're just tedious enough to not be fun, and the only reward is some extra points. That's true of a lot of this game, completing extra objectives gives points, finding secrets gives points, landing on the best goal position gives more points. However the points don't actually do anything -- there's no extra lives to gain -- and if you die you're guaranteed to lose almost all you've gained that level. It was a lot of effort put into a system that has no real incentive for the player to engage in, so I ended up just playing all levels the same and racing to the end. The enemy design is also pretty weak, there are only hoards of penguins which attempt to grab onto you. If too many grab on, you die, but there's no way to actually defeat them. Your only option is to run away and try to engage with them as little as possible. The bosses as well are pretty uninteresting, most of them being trivial to beat, with the exception of one that just seemed very poorly designed and a bit buggy. Penny herself is... fine. I didn't engage with the plot at all, and they made the odd decision that while all the characters just speak in speech bubbles (which is a good choice), Penny herself is a silent protagonist. It's really weird that everyone else has dialogue while Penny just... stands there. As I said, I didn't dislike this game, but I also didn't really have any positive experiences with it. I hope it does well enough for Evening Star to continue forward, as the talent is clearly there, but I don't think I would be interested in a Penny sequel.

An indie game by the developers of Sonic Mania, this is a momentum based 3D platformer that clearly takes inspiration from Sonic, but has an almost entirely different focus in terms of gameplay mastery.

The story is very basic, and cutscenes aren’t animated the best. I do like the character designs and art style, and environments look great, but some models, especially the bosses can look pretty rough. However in a game that’s all about quick reaction times and button presses I’m glad we have a consistent frame rate here over anything else.

But the gameplay takes you across 11 worlds where you must simply reach the end of the stage using some pretty damn fun controls. Penny operates almost entirely on momentum unless you’re just jogging along, you use a yo-yo to attack, roll on and perform some incredible acrobatics. Rolling and gaining speed through momentum is a huge part of This games level design, as most obtabcles can be tackled by keeping a good speed up, or by jumping over everything.

There’s a huge speed run potential with this game, and keeping the speed up is a great feeling.

Stages have missions and collectibles to find, but fully completing a stage requires you to keep up a combo of constant movement and get a certain score. Sometimes this is simple and other times it requires a huge amount of practice. Personally I think a Crash styled time trial would have suited the game better.

Once you get into the mindset of how you’re supposed to be playing this game for a high score, it’s very hard to train yourself out of it. This makes appreciating all the dialogue in stages next to impossible without forcing yourself to slow down completely against how the game is designed. I think if this game gets a sequel they could do with integrating the themes of the levels and the dialogue into the stages in a way that doesn’t force you to stop.

The games still fun without going the extra mile, but you will finish it very quickly if you don’t go all the way. Still, I enjoyed myself - 7.5/10