Grappin’ is a first person platformer made by former (?) Game Freak and Nintendo staff, and I’m the kind of freak who spends time looking up game credits on MobyGames to see what people are up to, which is how this ended up on my Steam wishlist. It has a soft-lit low poly aesthetic. You shoot a grappling hook at clay bricks, then you zip towards those bricks and gain a bit of upward momentum. The game looks and feels nice.
The level design is fine, but the progression is just annoying. Each area of the game is gated by a wall, each area of the game has a number of gold skull collectibles that must be obtained to pass that wall. An area might have 10 skulls, and you may only need 3; the problem is that these collectibles are not fungible. That is, the game doesn’t care about how many you have, it cares whether or not you found certain specific ones. All that you get is vague hints like “it’s in a cave” or “it’s near trees” so the level design itself is not the challenge, and is not what the player is going to actually interact with most of the time. You’re going to be doing a lot of wandering.
The level design is fine, but the progression is just annoying. Each area of the game is gated by a wall, each area of the game has a number of gold skull collectibles that must be obtained to pass that wall. An area might have 10 skulls, and you may only need 3; the problem is that these collectibles are not fungible. That is, the game doesn’t care about how many you have, it cares whether or not you found certain specific ones. All that you get is vague hints like “it’s in a cave” or “it’s near trees” so the level design itself is not the challenge, and is not what the player is going to actually interact with most of the time. You’re going to be doing a lot of wandering.