Nitrome’s first multiplayer game, and, as if to celebrate the occasion, a game that seems geared under the assumption you’re doing it co-op. You play as a troll (or as two trolls!) trapped inside a dungeon, the only way of escaping being to eat every other living thing inside. It feels… a lot like a top-down Kirby, if Kirby’s abilities ended at being able to suck things in and then projectile-spit them out: to beat enemies, you must first stun them by eating a part of the environment, which you then spit out to stun and then, hopefully, eat them. This game feels… slow: you can only complete levels once all enemies are dead, and this is a whole process of finding a block, spitting it at the enemy (potentially having to wait for it to start moving if it is one of the “I’m a turtle who’s invincible when I’m in my shell” dudes) and then walking over to eat it, all while levels tend to have at least ten enemies. Presumably, this is much smoother in co-op, where you and your partner can split off and do two things at once, but even then, this game feels too simple and braindead in difficulty to feel fun or rewarding to play. There are a bunch of different block types which all interact differently with you swallowing them up/spitting them out, in addition to all the different enemy types, but you stop seeing new things after the first third of the game, and even as late as the penultimate level you’re still dealing with the same enemies as you did right at the beginning, and while there are… sometimes frantic, sometimes finicky moments and mechanics, these are dispersed through a whopping 50 total levels (when the most a Nitrome game had before this was a measly 30) which mostly feel like a slow, inevitable trod to victory. When I was a kid, and when a lot of other Nitrome games weren’t ones I managed to beat, it felt great to actually clear one of these (and correctly guess what I at the time thought was a twist ending in the process). Now that I’m older, and now that I’m much more able to work through what… do still genuinely feel rather difficult, beating this doesn’t feel as rewarding or fun anymore.