Cool Spot is a game that I've owned since I was a kid. It was the kind of game I only played for a very short period, the farthest I had ever got was the third level before today. Its been a while since I played the game last, so I was surprised when I popped my Cool Spot cartridge into the SNES yesterday and ended up genuinely really digging it. It took me about 2 and a half hours to beat, I wasn't paying attention to time unfortunately so I can't give an exact measure.

Cool Spot is a fun little platformer in my opinion. It's sort of a Mega Man like game in that you have the ability to shoot a bunch of bubbles, which, as you can guess, are used to destroy your enemies. Combat is not nearly as much of a focus here as it is in a game like Mega Man, though; its more so just used as a means to defeat enemies and progress, whereas Mega Man has dedicated bosses you need to fight. Throughout the game, your goal is to find the cage that is holding another spot buddy in each level and destroy the cage, but you can't do that until you have enough of the red dot collectibles first. This creates a sort of interesting gameplay loop that makes you think more about your environment; some dots will just be easily available on wherever path you go to but others require you to think outside the box a little. There were a few times where I had found the cage early, but didn't have enough dots to finish the level, so I had to backtrack and explore a little more. The game tells you how many dots you have through a "Cool" bar in the HUD with a percentage on it. You need 60% Cool to unlock the cage, and getting 85% Cool will let you go to a bonus stage after finishing the level. Worth noting that this game lets you keep your Cool percentage when you die, so you don't have to worry about having to completely start over again when you die (although it will take you back to the beginning of the level with all enemies respawned).

Controlling Spot feels responsive and even quite satisfying, whenever I died I rarely felt like it was the fault of the controls. The physics aren't too wonky, either, although there are a few times where I jumped slower than expected. Thankfully those events never resulted in my death when that happened. Since Cool Spot is a pure platforming game, these aspects of the game are essential, so its nice to see that they're both good, at least in my opinion. I figured I would dedicate a section to this given how important that is.

Cool Spot's difficulty is selectable through the options menu. I just went with Normal like I do for most games I play and it felt like a rather standard platforming experience. If you can get enough Cool percentage for the bonus levels in two or three levels, you'll be just fine. Each bonus level has a letter in it that will serve as a Continue when collected and I found that they were not hard to find. The game is also generous enough with those 7-Up bottles that heal you (in case it wasn't obvious that this is the 7-Up video game lol), it rarely ever felt like overkill. Usually, whenever I REALLY needed the heal, the game would give it to me. Worth noting that you can take up to 6 hits if I remember correctly, which was not what I was expecting from this kind of platformer. As for the difficulty of the levels, I have no idea if the level design changes with your selected difficulty, but I do know that I felt none of the levels were especially hard to get through. The third level, Wading Around, was easily the one that gave me the most trouble because there is a lot of water around you that will instantly kill you if you fall in it and the level is built around that (its got tight platforming and there are some platforms that will drop you into the water if you don't jump off fast enough). Some enemies were very annoying - I hated those bees and hornets - while others were practically a non-issue. Overall, pretty balanced difficulty in my opinion.

The theming of this game feels pretty abstract and bizarre. I think it was meant to simulate just how small Spot was by putting him in various big locations. This can sort of be seen in the parts of the environment you can interact with, too: Spot can hang off the strings of balloons, climb ropes (or shoestrings in the case of one level), jump on bubbles, put himself inside bubbles to float upwards, and catapult himself up with mouse traps. Throughout your journey, you will find yourself in a beach, a pier, a wooden rat home with pipes, a bathtub, a toy room, a railway, and a train (in that order), although there are a few stages that reuse backgrounds and enemies as is standard for many old platformer games. Easily the weirdest stage is Loco Motive, the train level. It looks normal until you realize that there are giant floating balloons of weird cartoonish babies you need to jump on for platforming. The background is also constantly moving in that level, which can make you feel nauseous just by trying to focus on what you're platforming on. Nonetheless, I liked the way the stages looked and thought it had a unique fun feel to it. The game's art style doesn't look much different from other platformers of the time but it serves its purpose and helps accentuate the cartoonish nature of some of the stages.

Cool Spot gets a solid 3 stars from me. Its fun and does what a platformer should do, but it never really excels above that for me. Makes me want to drink a 7-Up though...it served its purpose after all, lol.