The beginning is dramatic. Someone attacks your house and your dad tells you to run while he holds the door shut. You grab your teddy bear, jump out the window, and start running without looking back. Your escape ends when you jump into a well that doesn’t lead to water but to a deep place below, where a strange man tells you to follow the doors if you want to find your way back up.
Once you enter the first door, you quickly understand what kind of experience awaits you, especially when it comes to dying. At its core, the game is a platformer focused heavily on jumping and occasional hitting objects and enemies with your teddy bear. Unfortunately, there is no gamepad support, so you are stuck using a keyboard. It works well enough, but it would certainly feel better with a controller.
Jumping feels decent and your character can grab onto ledges that stick out from walls, though not flat edges unless you get a skill later. Combat is another matter. Your attack range is small and you are very vulnerable. Enemies make this worse because they jump around constantly and do not care about their safety, which often makes it better to simply avoid them.
You can swim, but only barely. By repeatedly pressing the jump button you can stay close to the surface, though you need to reach the other side quickly because you run out of air within seconds. One unusual detail is that you can move upward through any body of water, including waterfalls. There is a simple swim option in the gameplay settings, but I did not notice any real difference. The other option, which disables fall damage, is far more noticeable and worth turning on. Without it, large drops will kill you instantly.
You can miss a jump now and then and falling into hazards will usually respawn you nearby, but if you lose all your hearts you are sent back to the start of the stage or to a checkpoint. Lava and other deadly hazards will also kill enemies, and you can lure them into danger since they love to chase you, but the enemy variety is very small.
Other threats are more predictable, though still dangerous because the game lacks any invincibility period after taking damage. This means you might get hit by a bullet, knocked into an enemy, and then into another hazard, losing all your hearts in a single moment. Later sections can be even worse, especially when you have to run from enemies that constantly bump into you, creating plenty of cheap deaths. This kind of design is rarely enjoyable and it is no different here.
The game is divided into individual stages. They appear large due to the small size of the main character, but they are usually quick to complete. Early stages are straightforward, though they soon introduce puzzle mechanics built around various items. The first three you encounter are a bomb that destroys blocks, dynamite that does the same but can stick to surfaces, and a Molotov cocktail that creates flames.
Other items are found by destroying boxes and vases, though their effects are only revealed through experimentation. In practice you do not really use items so much as throw them, since they are launched forward depending on your momentum. For example, you might find a scratch card that rewards you with coins, a cigar that seems to do nothing but create a cloud of smoke, or a water bottle that forms a platform when thrown onto lava.
Since item drops are random, you might get lucky and make certain situations easier, or you may have to solve them in the intended way. Unfortunately, some of the later stages become more of a chore than a challenge. With numerous traps, instant deaths, precise platforming, tight timing, and constant button mashing on the keyboard, it sometimes feels like the game pushes you to search for a specific item instead of solving the obstacle normally.
Each stage also contains a collectible that requires a bit more effort to obtain, though it remains manageable. Coins drop from enemies and breakable objects, but they bounce around and often fall into lava or other unreachable places, which can be frustrating. Their main use is in shops where you can buy throwable explosives. They are cheap and you can even kill the merchant to get free items, though the game also allows a small exploit.
This comes from the stage select menu, which lets you return to any completed stage to search for missed collectibles or revisit areas where you can grind for coins and items. You can also achieve something similar by simply using a door to return to the previous stage, which works well if both sides contain boxes and vases. In fact, using doors is the better option because it also triggers the auto save, just like checkpoints. The stage select menu does not activate this save feature.
The entire game is fairly short and the ending is minimal. Performance is mostly stable, though aside from occasional clipping issues with objects like the cat or arrows, there is a strange frame drop that occurs every few minutes throughout the entire game. Another odd detail is that the stage select screen contains one or two stages that you cannot return to, which makes me wonder if they are secret areas or simply broken.
Story