Penny’s Big Breakaway, to me, feels like a holy conglomerate of Super Mario Odyssey, Pizza Tower, and Sonic Mania. To anyone even remotely familiar with any of these games, this is a huge note of endearment. It hits the nail on the head with how it prioritizes the momentum based flow that Sonic Mania and Pizza Tower mastered, the “maintaining your speed while weaving around to find secrets without losing your combo” of Pizza Tower, and the open-feeling level structure and more nuanced moveset of Mario Odyssey. It exceeded my already lofty expectations in spectacular fashion that, while lacking the polish and finishing touches to be placed in the unabashed masterpiece department, offers moment-to-moment gameplay of such high caliber that its all too easy to ignore its few shortcomings.

Similar to 90% of people interested in this game, my own interest stems from the development team being the same as Sonic Mania’s. Let me lay out something really quickly: Sonic Mania is one of the definitive, tangible examples of proof we have that beings of divine ordinance do, in fact, exist. Everything from the game’s presentation to how its levels are constructed to take advantage of your momentum-based toolkits feels so meticulously and lovingly sculpted. Its one of my all time favorite games, period, and as someone who grew up playing the Genesis era of Sonic games I can’t even begin to describe how satisfying it was to see a group who was not only able to capture that magic again, but surpass it.

So naturally, I was stoked for Penny’s Big Breakaway. I had absolutely no reservations about picking it up just from the names attached to the work. To my complete lack of surprise, they hit it out of the park again with another immensely satisfying gameplay experience that scratches an itch that many other games aren’t really trying to hit on.

This is a 3D platformer, yes, but I think limiting it to that is honestly deceptive towards where it’s true strengths lie. In actuality, Penny’s Big Breakway is the Momentum based experience, with all of the moves and your arsenal and the winding paths wanting to take advantage of the fact that you rarely ever need to slow down. I will note that there’s absolutely a learning curve here, a bit more harsh than most modern platformers which have begun to gravitate towards more simple control schemes, but once it ‘clicks’…it really clicks. You realize that everything in Penny’s arsenal flows into every other move in her arsenal and then, before you know it, you’re chaining together longer and longer unbreaking combos and completely demolishing stages in record time. At times, you even feel “smarter” than the game, especially on repeat visits to stages where you start discovering shortcuts and how to get through that part that gave you trouble more efficiently. But the truth is that all of these “I’m so smart” moments are baked into the game’s design philosophy of making a level that initially feels very disjointed and confusing into something with a very clear, connected flow. It’s great stuff.

Also of note is that it’s a great example of a platformer that retains its consistency in quality from start to finish. There’s no fall-off with some of the later stages which a few of my favorite platformers have fallen victim to in the past and, in fact, I would go as far as to say that the later levels of PBB are where the game really shines.

The game’s shortcomings are relegated pretty strictly to things that all fit under the umbrella of “it maybe needed a couple more months in the oven”. The fixed camera (a bold choice for a modern 3D platformer btw, but it works) can cause some issues sometimes and leads to a few risky jumps that really shouldn’t be that risky. Collision with certain objects and platforms is just super janky and lead to more than my fair share of completely unjust deaths, including a few instances where I just straight up fell through the bottom of the map for no reason. Presentation wise I think the game flip-flops from being charmingly inviting and whimsical to…sort of ugly (but it’s clear that this is more of a budget issue and it doesn’t impact gameplay so I don’t care much). Honestly my biggest little nitpick that’s not technical is that there’s so many little dudes all over the map who are constantly saying things to you, and I want to stop and hear what they have to say but I also really don’t want to stop my zen mode constantly to let a textbox finish. It’s a really minor detail but it was a genuinely conflicting issue for me.

Thankfully, a patch can resolve most of these technical issues and they don’t really detract from how great the game is overall. Platformers have been killing it recently and I really want to continue communicating the message that “yes, we want more games like this. please.” Super excited to see what this talented team has in store for their next project!

i've never played another game published by Private Division - but my wife LOVED Kerbal Space Program, so i was a little afraid when i saw their name on this after KSP 2's botched early-access release. and i should have been! this game is really neat, but it just wasn't ready. going fast while platforming in Penny's Big Breakaway (atm) is to get stuck on a slope, or get stuck in a platform, or just completely overshoot it and fall into the abyss. it's frustrating!!!!!! even without its bugs, i think its control system will filter out a lot of players. it's not that immediately satisfying, it requires a certain level of understanding to be rewarding and i love games like that! i love when they make me learn things! i just don't always know if performing well in-game is even that rewarding. maybe i just have bad depth-perception? regardless, i hope Evening Star make more 3D platformers cuz this is a really cool one. insanely gorgeous to the eyes and ears, but not as fulfilling to my soul. fully willing to accept that as a skill-issue tho.

Penny's Big Breakaway is a good game I can say this. Like I enjoy zooming through levels and chain combos so you can rack up a ton of points. From the team of Sonic Mania comes a well-polished game that plays like smooth butter. However, the game suffers from bugs and glitches that can ruin the experience and/or fun some. Like, I got that emotional high when I racked up huge combos only to either be stuck in on some platform's edge/slope because Penny is in a falling animation, or straight up fall through the floor and break the combo; it's just a headache, is all. Regardless, ripping this game open is fun to truly become an expert at the movement for reaching that skill ceiling is satisfying and I love it.

If you love the game, then that's awesome. Just didn't really connect with me compared to other platformers like Pizza Tower.

Viewtiful Joe is as remarkable now looking backwards as it was in 2003 looking forwards. In 2003, it felt like a bizarre comic book beat em up, a spiritual successor of sorts to Comix Zone with a wackier heart and much more fleshed out mechanics and replayability. 20 years later, Viewtiful Joe feels like equal parts a premonition and a diversion. Director Hideki Kamiya previously redefined the action genre with the 2001 masterpiece Devil May Cry, but with this successor he seems to switch gears entirely to a 2D beat-em-up that lacks the obvious elegance that Devil May Cry had. Looking ahead to 2009's Bayonetta, though, and it becomes incredibly clear just what a step forward Viewtiful Joe was for him not just in terms of mechanical polish, but in terms of the overall refinement of the packages he set out to deliver as a game director.

The most obvious evolution from Devil May Cry actually exists outside of both its aesthetics and its combat mechanics: The Ranking System. Devil May Cry would score you during combat based solely on your moment-to-moment performance, with a hotbar that changed as you played. If you were using a lot of moves and avoiding damage, your letter grade increased. If you were doing poorly or playing it safe, it would stay low. Individual battles did not award rankings, and only at the end of the stage were you given a cumulative score based on playtime, items used, deaths suffered, and so on. Viewtiful Joe evolves this system beautifully, with every individual encounter awarding you a score for three separate factors: your time taken to complete the encounter, the damage you took during it, and how many points you got for dishing out damage and using your abilities. This makes every section of a stage much more thrilling. Devil May Cry, being a Resident Evil-like, often re-filled rooms full of enemies and had you do the same encounter multiple times based on your traversal. Viewtiful Joe, to put it bluntly, doesn't fuck around. It has set battles, set puzzles, set setpieces, and that's it. If you're an experienced player, you know going in exactly what you're up against and how to accomplish those tasks. Devil May Cry frequently tasked the player with tricky platforming and then punished them with repeated battles if they were a hair off on their jumps. Because Devil May Cry only grades the player at the end of chapters, a single flubbed jump could mean multiple additional minutes of playtime and many more opportunities for taking damage. Viewtiful Joe deals no such spades, you simply play the level and move forward until it's complete. Even the tricky platforming and annoying sequences in this game (and there are many!) are challenges in their own right, and not challenges that punish you with tedious repeat challenges if you fail them. Unless you die. And you will.

Viewtiful Joe remains as agonizingly difficult in 2023 as it was in 2003. Most enemies are pretty simple, but the game delights in throwing combinations of annoying enemies and boss fights at you, as well as surrounding you with environmental hazards at pretty much all times. It doesn't take a whole lot of damage for Joe to die, and the game's cruelest trick by far is its Lives systems. If you run out of lives, you're knocked back to the last checkpoint. Period. Lives are rare to find in-game and cost a good chunk of change in the shop to purchase, and you can't just hop into the shop willy-nilly. If you make it to the end of a stage and get stuck on the final section and lose your last two lives, sorry chump. Replay the whole stage. It's not entirely unforgiving however - the game lets you keep all of the V-Points you earned during your failed attempt, meaning you can head into the shop and buy new abilities or extra lives before setting out into the meat grinder again. Devilishly, the game doesn't allow you to save before boss fights - Only at the start of a stage and at the mid-chapter checkpoint. And boss fights are BRUTAL in Viewtiful Joe, often long slugfests that demand practical perfection from its players. And the mandatory boss rush at the end of the game? May well be the most difficult mandatory boss rush in the history of video games. Wind Waker this ain't.

Mechanically, Viewtiful Joe is splendid. The VFX system only has a few tricks, but they're all good ones. Slow-Mo is your bread and butter, and its constant use here was clearly the primary mechanical inspiration for Bayonetta. It's another instance of the game feeling like a premonition for the action game masterpieces that Kamiya followed it up with, and while the rest of the VFX powers aren't nearly as fun to use, they're no slouches in the utility department. Mach Speed allows you to move at twice the speed you normally would, and attacking enemies in this state causes little Viewtiful Joe clones to appear and attack other elements onscreen, destroying background objects to spawn health items or even damaging other enemies or minibosses. Do this long enough and Joe will catch fire, setting every enemy he attacks on fire and also making him immune to fire damage. I thought this was a pretty cute but meaningless detail until it suddenly became necessary for beating one of the final bosses, a brilliant deployment of a mechanic that had up until then been only subtly encouraged. Zoom is probably the least effective move for traversal, only being useful for solving a few late-game puzzles, but it's devastating in combat, allowing for some incredibly damaging techniques. All in all, Joe feels pretty mechanically fleshed out. He's no Bayonetta or Gene, or even Devil May Cry 1 Dante, but the 2D perspective and short length of the game mean he doesn't have to be. He feels deep and rewarding enough to master that the avid player who wants to earn Rainbow V's on every stage can feel awesomely powerful by putting in the time and effort to learn him.

It's not all rainbow colored roses, though. Due to its 2D perspective, Viewtiful Joe suffers harder than most action games do to the age old problem of the camera. The camera is often fairly zoomed in on the action, so whenever you're moving to an area that isn't currently onscreen there's a pretty high likelihood that an enemy is preparing (or currently using) an attack that you just cannot see. I lost track of the amount of times I got absolutely demolished by attacks that I could not have possibly dodged because a bomb was about to explode somewhere on a ledge below my character that I dropped onto without knowing anything was there. And in a game this unforgiving, that kind of damage adds up. It leads to the game feeling even more frustrating than the developers intended, and it can seriously wear you down. In that regard, I would probably call it Kamiya's most difficult game.

I would also call it his worst. But that's saying a lot, because Viewtiful Joe is still better than most modern action games. I'd put it a hair above 2023's Hi-Fi Rush, even. Kamiya's understanding of the action genre and the variety of challenges tasked to the player makes it a constantly engaging and rewarding playthrough, at least when it's not beating the tar out of you. In 2023 it's just as good a game as it is fascinating a document of the progression of the action game genre during a period where it was probably at its experimental peak. Coming only 2 years after Devil May Cry and 2 years before Resident Evil 4 and God Hand, it's very easy to lose track of Viewtiful Joe amidst all the other action classics of the time. But a middle step is still an important step, and there's more than enough buried in here to make it worth playing for any fan of action games.

Viewtiful Joe is a constant balancing act. It's mostly a fun, creative beat em up. The mechanics of slowing and speeding up time are unique and well executed for combat and platforming. Add this on top of creative presentation, and the first three stages are a tightly paced and fun time. But unfortunately, a lot of the game's tough-but-fair gameplay can get dragged down by some obnoxious design choices that really start to crop up the further into the game you get. Sometimes enemies will hit you from off screen. Sometimes you need to make blind jumps. Sometimes you have to fight the same enemy with way too much health over and over. Sometimes the boss you're fighting has an annoying pattern that they use over and over. Not to mention the completely needless boss rush stage, which is capped off by a pretty terrible fight. It's unfortunate, because it takes what could have been a fantastic game down to just a good one.

I tried, I failed, I gave up.

Viewtiful Joe has been a game I've wanted to play since I first saw its advertisements back in the early 2000's. It has so much style, oozes cool, and just gives off a vibe that my teenage boy brain wanted to play so badly. Unfortunately, I never got to experience Joe's adventures at the game's launch and now, many years later, I can't even beat the first level...

As much as I wanted to love and adore Viewtiful Joe I just suck at this game and abandoned it to play other things. Sorry Joe.

This game is amazing! Probably one of the best beat 'em ups I've ever played. The action, writing, characters, levels and even the graphics, everything is very over the top and exaggerated. But the best thing is that it just fits perfectly! The gameplay also helps this "anime-feel", since you really need to know what you're doing in order to get to the ending and it's just nice to pull a good tough combo or figure out how to defeat a boss. Also, there are some very good unlockables here!

Few things annoyed me, though. This game is brutal and that's ok, but some parts felt like it was brutal for the sake of being brutal. That "boss gauntlet" is just bad design and what's up with the final episode? Everything in it is just repetitive and tedious. In my opinion, the devs got lazy after the fight with Leo.

Other than that, GREAT game! Play it NOW!

fuck ok so why is this game so good tho

i still dont have solid ideas as to what this game is and means to me on this day and age

i dont even know its trying to do on its own but its absolutely magical

for an rpgmaker the depth and weight of the story and art direction and all that stuff is unmatched and I cant recommend this enough to anyone who either enjoys or despises rpgs

off shows how the rpgmaker "genre" can be pushed to its boundaries with an inventive and groundbreaking view on the entire videogame landscape and this happened in fucking 2008 I could Not believe this was made in 2008 at first and for anyone wondering it was made by TWO PEOPLE and I can tell you with seriousness that they poured to the last ounce of love into this project and its apparent and very clear

on a technical side this is an rpgmaker game like you've seen everywhere around top down perspective simple mechanics puzzles everywhere an atb battle system some stock elements here and there but with so much charm that I think is still unmatched in the rpg department

you fight some bad guys you level up acquire party members upgrade stuff and learn special abilities and now we can get into off weak point

the battle system isn't the best around here since you can basically auto pilot every single fight even the boss fight and most of the time you won't know what the fuck you or the enemy are doing because the abilities have some super random ass names like color of god (invented) so you're like ok well that had a cool animation and thats fucking it plus it all happens so fast and so soon you won't even have the time to learn all these abilities and battle aspects and realistically you don't have to

also abilities have some elements but again they have no real purpose apart from being a callback to the elements in the world of off

world that is dystopia falling apart absolutely hyper capitalistic and dreadful to a notch and can still be charming in some cursed ways

you play as the batter no name no nothing he's just here all of the sudden and his mission and kind of a holy vow is to purify the entirety of this wicked world

you get guided by mister big words cat aka the judge who acts as a walking tutorial for the first part of the game and then for far off guidance throughout your annihilation quest

what happens is you begin to battle against specters who all of the sudden are infesting the place here and there and in order to purify each zone you'll have to kill the guardian of each land

during all this you also meet my sunshine zechariah who is first and foremost the merchant of this game (useless because you won't be using any item whatsoever in this game and you can just buy some equipment from time to time) and also a guy who sees through the game and makes some forth wall remarks addressing YOU as the player mainly because they let you choose the name at the beginning of the game so he's like hey stinkypoopoo I know you're there

storywise it all gets kinda linear there's people around overworked overfatigued and also scared by the ghosts so you gotta help them unless they turn crazy and start attacking you while their head explodes into a mush of blackness then you just traverse this lands around and around for useless loots and advance doing some bat shit puzzles that I honestly advice you to look l up sometimes on the Internet because theyre not for stupid people like me apparently

characters tho are a whole new story you don't get that much of an insight for most of them but it's just great how with so little they can give them distinct and precise personalities

apart from the batter who actually is the most (rightfully) cold blooded apathetic and all in all a man of few words with clean as sky delivering and honestly for a man who is swayed by a holy mission an unwavering will is required plus he's basically killing anything he finds suspicious or tainted so like

the judge is enigmatic and firstly authoritarian because he uses big words so he must be clever and tyrannical but as you progress you see more sides of him being an empathetic rightful and all in all good guy

the guardians all have distinct personalities and the only worthy thing to be said about the inhabitants of this hell of a world is that they have some funny sfx when they speak still a change in their attitude always shows signs of deterioration keep that in mind

and that leaves zacharie now he's a cool guy kind of a comic relief and kind of a dork but we only get so much as a glimpse of his personality and yet he's probably been the most liked character in the community (rightfully so)

you purify the zones and everything slowly dies but thay us your duty

SPOILER TERRITORY
when you get to the room which is a place that details some insightful flashbacks about the guardians and the nature of this place but it remains kind of vague and unfulfilling so you're face to face with the queen and after some enigmatic dialogues you also end up killing a kid named hugo and possibly the last and the rooms guardian

you come across a switch and the judge comes back to tell you how fucking angry he is that you were supposed to just purify the lands but just ended up pushing evert corner of the world into nothingness

you then get to choose which side take and if you just side with the batter you kill the judge and end the game with a message saying

the switch was turned OFF

plunging the entire univers into the void

if you decide to side with the judge tho you will get a new perspective on the batter who is not the holy messiah you thought he was from the beginning of the game but a murderous and animalistic being whose only real intent was that to slaughter anyone and anything in his path

killing him is easy task and the judge just looters around the now white and silent lands forever

wild

as you may know this is not a story with a clear direction you don't get decisive proofs to what's happening or what the backstory even mean and that's fine like most of this obscure indie whatever games you don't get a full conclusion to the events and thats perfectly fine for me

what really is a game winner for me tho is a the majestic and ominous atmosphere that accompanies you from the very first moments of the game till the grand finale

art wise this game is odd as shit

in the overwolrd every single character sprite and building and world around it is monochromatic detailed by thick lines and huge color contrasts to a point that the characters stick out as ultra white on these saturated colored backgrounds but where this actually gets real good is in mortis ghosts style that shines through during through battles and in the little character portraits when they talk

honestly I was not expecting this level of wonky (in a good way) artistry but for the most part the art is delightful every monster design is great to look at and super varied and the imaginative creativity of mortis ghost really is the winning point in these design just look at the bosses or any battle screen really absolutely phenomenal

the other aspect that really heightens the entire atmosphere is the sound design and ost department who is entirely curated by alias conrad coldwood (co creator of this game) and his talent is incredible his electronic and industrial flavored dark ambient sells the game for me it has a lot of range and immortalised every single scene efficiently and he can make some bopping battle themes if you ask me and its no surprise to me that silent hill was some of the main influence for this game since the whole trip hop feeling is here and thriving just listen to the main battle theme or MY favorite boss theme this theme is absolutely fucking phenomenal people I cant believe this is even real like goated videogame BGM all times masterpiece

anyhow this game is great I advice anyone who's reading this to play it it has some weird stuff and even some frustrating progression but surely it's worth it

I so need a remake god shit fuck