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.