Adam and Eve: The Game - Chapter 1

This game is such a frustrating mess, it almost feels deliberate. The difficulty is obvious: one hit deaths, no continues after losing all your lives, but it goes so much deeper than that. The hitboxes are brutal, it really feels like you have to give several pixels of space to any obstacle you don’t want to hit. The obstacles also blend into the background. I kept running into the spiky things on the first level because they used multiple sprites that hide in the grass and trick your eyes. At least those weren’t one-hit deaths, though. The vines, though? The thin ones curling around the platforms that look like they could break if you came in contact? I kept finding ways to brush against them and die. In a fair world, punishing obstacles would be offset by decent control. The jumps are awkward, but not the worst to control, like it’s not too heavy or too floaty. However, you can’t run and jump, because if you come to the edge of a platform, you will slip and fall off. Yet that isn’t even the worst issue. There are some platforming sections where it looks like you can jump to another path or skip a platform going in a different direction. Those empty, harmless looking spaces have invisible death boxes to make sure you jump on every platform in the correct order, a baffling design decision. Your best bet to get far into the game is to farm on a level that has a one-up. Get the one-up and die, but keep collecting fruits that eventually stack into extra lives. The problem is that the deaths are so cheap, I actually kept slipping off the edge of the first platform of the level I tried to grind on, losing lives before I could touch the one-up. Add to that how poorly the game was optimized that these miniscule levels have loading times, and why should I even bother? It really does feel like this was made to waste time. The level load times are one thing, even if they are only a few seconds each, the unskippable titles are another thing, but not uncommon. But when it gets to the title screen, it doesn’t let you start the game immediately. No, it waits a few seconds before it lets you press start, as if playing the game is a privilege! Then, if you want to quit from the title screen, you have to wait a few more seconds after that! What a fussy game.