Pepper Grinder

Short but sweet game, finds a way to keep the main mechanic of drilling interesting from stage to stage, whether it's by surprising you with the item you drill with, or by introducing different types of terrains/obstacles you drill through and into. Those mechanics are also fleshed out well during the level they are introduced, and are brought up again when you least expect it, though all of them are intuitive enough to never pose a challenge for progression. The pixel-art environments are tightly detailed which creates a good contrast with the simpler moving characters and interactable elements, I found the few moments where Pepper reacted to the people/events around pretty charming. My only complaint would be that the detection for entering drilling mode isn't loose enough, sometimes I would feel as though I had timed my button press nicely, but would end up falling and losing health, which can be unnerving as the latter levels tend to grow the distance between checkpoints. This is the most noticeable when drilling from very close but disjoints pieces of drill-able terrain, as they only sometimes get drilled into automatically when you jump from one into the other, and when trying to drill into a moving piece of terrain. Although it's no deal-breaker.