What a charming little game! Super Kiwi, like all of Siactro's games, is very short, but I think it's easily the best one that I've played. A great way to have a chill hour just exploring some nicely made levels, with some honestly pretty smooth controls and basic platforming mechanics. Visually it's a little janky round the edges and the sound design could definitely use some work, but Super Kiwi 64 comes off as a sweet and earnest little title that deserves an hour of your time.

Kiwi does has a bit of weirdness in it; every now and again there will be some arcane symbols or a spooky skeleton sprite or a switch that looks like a fetus, generally just a sprinkling of weird slightly unsettling features that don't seem like they fit here. Siactro's other games do this too, but Kiwi cranks it up a notch by even letting it apply to the some of the level themes (e.g. a post-industrial hellscape, or an eldritch temple full of creepy faces and the aforementioned fetus-switches). I think going more all-in on the weird features made them stick out a little less than in Toree and Toree 2, but yeah, I still don't really understand why they're here. It doesn't detract from the game being relaxed and fun though, so whatever; I kinda consider this sort of thing to be Siactro's signature at this point.

Reviewed on Sep 21, 2023


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