Category: Nintendo News

The 2D-platformer is a genre that has stood the test of time and, with just a few simple changes, it’s still possible to make it feel fresh and exciting. Whether it’s the power to reverse time, the ability to swap perspectives, or some gravitational tweaks to mix things up. 6180 the moon casts the Moon itself as our protagonist, showing that, with the right gameplay, even controlling astronomical bodies can feel elegant and precise. 

Originally releasing on the Wii U eShop, our lovely lunar friend has made the jump to Switch, bringing the same, relaxing, minimalist journey we enjoyed so much in our original review. You control the Moon as it dances through the stars, venturing from planet to planet trying to find out why the Sun has vanished. It’s an adventure to the heart of the solar system, punctuated by charming, whimsical dialogue from an undeniably unique cast of characters. While the plot itself might not be anything remarkable, it’s presented to the player with such sincerity and heart that it becomes compelling, and the fact that each planet has its own personality makes you want to press on to see the next interaction.

Controlling the moon is as simple as pressing ‘A’ to jump and moving left or right to guide yourself around the series of 5 areas, each of which contains 10 levels. Some of these can be completed in less than a minute, while some trickier challenges can stretch this out over multiple attempts. While new ideas are steadily introduced, your bright orb of light is generally tasked with jumping from platform to platform, dodging spikes and other obstacles to make it to the goal. There are no lives or any kind of ‘Game Over’ screens, so you’re free to keep trying as much as you like, and even unlock checkpoints along the way. It’s simple, straightforward fun delivered in small, rapid chunks of gameplay – making this perfect for the Switch’s portable mode. 

Unfortunately, what is arguably the game’s most defining feature has been impacted somewhat by the jump from one eShop to another. Whenever you jump off the screen, either from the top or bottom, you appear immediately on the other side, looping the area in a number of gravity-bending ways. Reaching a higher platform can be achieved by dropping down for example, and moving forward so you end up falling from the top of the screen. On Wii U, this actually took place across two screens, making delightful use of the GamePad by forcing the player to split their attention across both the television and the smaller screen as the moon moved between both. On Switch, everything is contained on the one screen, so the mechanic absolutely remains but is a little less interesting as a result. On other platforms, such as PC, this was always the case, so it isn’t an outright disaster by any means, but this astral phenomenon does lose some of its shine nonetheless.

That being said, the game still looks gorgeous on Switch whether in handheld mode or docked, with its distinctive palette of stark backgrounds and gleaming white abstractions of the Universe. It’s not going to stun with its variety of open environments by any means, but its artistic direction is clear and it carries a mysterious, whimsical mood that’s only elevated by the excellent soundtrack. Each movement frequently adds another note or delicate chime to the soundscape, lending a dynamic quality to the drifting piano pieces and quiet moments. The fact that the musical score follows you from one level to the next helps smooth over how quickly some of them go by, helping it feel more like a single, cohesive journey.

It isn’t a game that relies on punishing difficulty either, which may be seen as a flaw by some seasoned platformers, but helps make this accessible to anyone. In fact, you could fairly handily complete the entire game in about 2 – 3 hours total, and despite an integrated achievement system and unlockable mirror-mode, there isn’t a huge amount of content here outside of the main adventure. For its budget price, though, we still feel it’s absolutely worth it if you’re looking for a more relaxed experience, with a gradual increase in challenge as you progress helping its cause nicely.

Conclusion

6180 the moon is a dreamlike journey through the stars, where every individual component of its delicate soundtrack, minimalist visuals and graceful gameplay mechanics work together to form an extremely compelling experience. Rather than an intense challenge, it offers up a short but memorable adventure that’s easily broken up into smaller sessions, or enjoyed all at once in a single lazy afternoon. While the Wii U version provided a unique perspective through its use of the GamePad, we’d still absolutely recommend this solar trip on Switch for anyone who missed out on it before – there’s still plenty of time to catch the sunrise. 

Penny might not consider herself a goth, but the fact she dresses up as a demon and works at a funeral parlour has the rest of Flatwood Peaks thinking otherwise. When her over-the-top antics get her fired, she reacts just like any other person would – and drives to a local cemetery to hang out in a crypt with her boyfriend. You know, as you do.

Unfortunately, said crypt collapses beneath her feet and the sharp-tongued heroine plunges to her none-too-ironic death. Luckily for her (if you can call it ‘luck’) she awakens in the underworld to find Death himself has decided to go on vacation, mistaking Penny for the temporary replacement he’s been waiting an eternity to arrive. Now with a black cloak and a magical scythe to her name, it’s up to our Pen to help settle the unfinished business of the local dead.

So yes, Flipping Death basically Mort (one of the brilliant Discworld novels from the late Sir Terry Pratchett) in all but name, but as a premise for a game, it makes for a deliciously intriguing setup – especially in the hands of a quirky developer like Zoink Games. With the power to possess the living (because, why not), Penny can ‘flip’ her 2.5D world to return to the land of the not-yet-dead. Pressing ‘L’ enables you to read the thoughts of her current host, revealing clues for quests, while moving the right analog stick will enable you to control them and use each citizen’s unique traits to solve all manner of puzzles.

You’ll need to control an unhinged dentist in order to open a giant can of paint, use the poking powers of would-be supervillain Pokeman and even control a whale who needs to unblock the skeletons stuck in their blowhole. It’s all very weird in a black-humoured Double Fine sort of way, but there’s a surreal pleasure to exploring Flatwood Peaks from the perspective of the underworld and using each of the townsfolk like a fleshy collectable.

If you’ve played Stick it to the Man! already, you’ll instantly recognise its nightmarishly comedic art style – in fact, Flipping Death shares a lot of common features with 2014’s memorable platformer. Both games use an open-plan approach to exploring its open-ended environment, but this new instalment ensures you never get lost by adding in a map filled with points of interest and a pictorial hint system that always points you in the right direction. It can make solving its puzzles a little too easy, but it helps avoid the game from falling into the pitfall of using over-obtuse quests.

You can also teleport to any characters you’ve possessed in that chapter, although these teleportation points reset after every chapter. Thankfully, the ghostly sprites that float around town in the world of the dead – which are used as a currency for possession – are more than abundant, although you’ll have to search a little harder to unlock some of the rarer variants (which in turn enable you to control mission-specific characters). It’s a cute feature that rewards exploration with the fuel you need to bother the living, although switching between both worlds (which quite literally flips the screen) can get a little disorientating for a game all about revisiting locations.

Most of the objectives you’re given by assisting various characters also fit together like one long quest-like puzzle, with one completed task unlocking the way for the next. For instance, you’ll need to use a trumpet-playing jazzman to help blow a whale back into a lake, but to do that you’ll need to get a dog currently bothering the local chef to chase a cat that works a nearby bridge. With its colourful cast of weirdos, misfits and downright rotters, the sheer silliness of Flipping Death’s surreal setting ensures these seemingly basic tasks never feel mundane thanks to the entertaining dialogue.

The addition of challenges hidden throughout the game (based mainly around getting certain controlled citizens to perform special tasks) adds extra replay value, as do the collectable Ghost Cards that reveal more about Flatwood Peaks’ oddball residents. It certainly makes Flipping Death a meatier prospect than the criminally-short Stick it to the Man!, and shows Zoink Games has taken the time to listen to the issues that stopped that first game from being the instant classic it almost was.

Conclusion

Flipping Death does share plenty of DNA with Stick it to the Man! – ranging from the floatiness of its platforming to the ability to read the minds of other characters – but that doesn’t stop it from being a far superior offering in almost every way. We’re still not quite sure why Death is possessing the souls of the living and sorting out the loose ends of the dead, but it makes for a memorable black-humoured adventure that deserves to haunt your Nintendo Switch immediately.

When it comes to genres that the indie scene is absolutely enamoured with, few would rank higher than the roguelike and Metroidvania genres. It’d be easy to dismiss Dead Cells, then, as low-effort pandering to a current industry trend, another forgettable release in a marketplace rife with better options. Such a judgment would be wrong, however. Dead Cells manages to fuse these two genres together in a meaningful way, creating an addictive, difficult, and fun experience that will keep players engaged for hours on end.

The story in Dead Cells is kept to a minimum, largely acting as a subtle context for the strong gameplay. You play as a nameless, undead hero who reanimates in a grimy prison cell, and your task is simply to escape the prison. As you explore the diverse environments, occasional rooms will contain notes or other clues that gradually introduce a threat called ‘The Malaise’ that ravaged the prison. Couple these notes with the short vignettes that are included on the loading screens when you enter a new area, and there’s just enough information provided to keep you asking questions and wanting more, even if there isn’t strictly a coherent plot to the events. For this sort of game, this storytelling style works well, even if it feels a bit thin, and we appreciate the masterful air of mystery that’s so intricately woven.

The gameplay acts as the main star of the show here, and what a bright star it is. After picking a starter weapon and a secondary at the outset of each run, you plumb the depths of procedurally-generated dungeons chock full of all sorts of ghouls and monsters that want to tear you limb from limb. And tear you up they will; it only takes a few hits from most enemies to kill you outright or bring you to death’s door. If you can manage to rise above the odds, your character will be rewarded with Cells and gold — both of which are critical to progression — and you might even get a nice weapon drop out of it, too.

Combat is fast-paced and fluid, favouring aggressive tactics, but careful play. Your character swipes quick and deadly with most weapons and has a dodge roll that can get you out of trouble in a pinch, and these abilities mean that most skirmishes are over in a blink of an eye. There’s a certain rhythm one gets into once combat ‘clicks’, as you wait for the tells that an attack is incoming and punish the weaknesses that are subsequently exposed, and this rhythm can be utterly intoxicating. While the enemies may have the upper hand those first few times you’re coming to grips with things, it doesn’t take long until your character becomes a diving and dancing scourge of death, rinsing the dungeon corridors of monsters while making a tidy profit off of their spoils.

The weapons you use are ultimately divided into three sub-classes: Brutality, Tactics, and Survival, and it’s through wise mixtures of different weapon types and stats that you stand the best chance of survival. Some weapons can freeze enemies while others can ignore shields, and each weapon can have any number of attributes to further distinguish them, like upping damage percentages against enemies afflicted with certain status conditions. It’s safe to say that you will never use the same weapon twice in this game, but that’s part of the charm; you make do with what you’ve got until you find something better.

To help soften the blow of having to start a run with sub-par weaponry, there are power scrolls randomly scattered through each level that allow you to boost your stats in one of the three different sub-classes, increasing your damage with those weapons while also upping your overall maximum health. Each time you bump a stat higher, it’ll be a little less effective to invest the next power scroll into that stat, encouraging diversification, but not mandating it. Dead Cells is a game that’s all about player choice, making both victories and defeats feel rightfully earned, and this system of levelling your character does a great job of giving a balanced set of pros and cons to the choices you make.

Every time you reach the end of an area, you’ll be treated to a brief safe room where you can take a minute to gather yourself and plan out the next confrontation. Exploration and enemy drops will sometimes lead to you receiving blueprints, which can be handed over to a shop to be banked. To use the item in the blueprint (or at least to have the option of it appearing in a run), you must invest enough cells into the item to buy it. This system helps to ensure that the player always feels like they’re progressing, as better weapon blueprints are always being dropped and unlocked at a relatively consistent rate. This means that subsequent runs seem easier in comparison, as you’re more likely to find better equipment that can carry you much further. It’s a satisfying loop, one which softens the bite of a roguelike resetting you on every death without completely defanging it.

Feeding more into the permanent progression of Dead Cells are the Metroidvania elements, which mostly manifest in permanent traversal abilities that you gain from defeating very tough bosses in certain areas. There’s not really much backtracking to speak of here — you’re not able to go back to an area once you leave it — but a new ability you obtain may be able to unlock a shortcut to a later area from earlier in the game or open a brand new path entirely. Much like a typical Metroidvania, acquiring new abilities leads to more and more of the game being opened up to you, which helps to make the player feel all the more empowered as they deepen their understanding. Some may be a bit miffed that the exploration elements aren’t nearly as strong as they first seem, but they’re still done in such a way that few other roguelikes have tried.

One point that bears mentioning is the light sense of repetition that can set in upon playing extended hours of Dead Cells. For all its flawless combat and gorgeous locales, the overall gameplay structure largely remains the same throughout the experience, which may be a sticking point for some. Aside from some rather thin gimmicks, like a level that has you running between safe zones in a poisonous fog, every new level feels rather like a reskinned version of the level that came before it, just with a new set of enemies. The fun of the moment to moment gameplay makes this something that you won’t be paying too much attention to for most of the time, but we did have a few too many moments of déjà vu where progress felt almost artificial in light of how little things seemed to change over an extended run. The weapon and enemy variety help to trivialize this matter, we just wish there were a bit more to make each new level feel truly unique.

On the presentation side of things, Dead Cells absolutely astounds, showcasing intricately detailed and well-animated pixel art that looks fantastic in motion. Each area you visit looks almost entirely different than the last, from misty fishing towns to castle spires silhouetted against a setting sun; they all utilize a distinct atmosphere that helps to make each place forge its own identity. This is only further backed by the broad colour palette used, with each area using a whole new range of colours for all the backgrounds, traps, and enemies that you encounter. Animations are extremely well detailed and distinct, too, moreso than you would expect, and the detail is something which helps considerably in making combat feel that extra bit more fluid and responsive. Woven through all of this is smartly directed sound design that layers in brooding gothic music where it fits, setting the tone and the mood without overwhelming the player or distracting them from the battles at hand.

Conclusion

Dead Cells is a masterclass in excellent roguelike design, mixing together nonstop intense action sequences, gorgeous vistas, and an addictive loop of unlocks and rewards into a beautiful experience that no Switch owner will want to go without. There’s dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of content available here, and though some sense of repetition can creep in every now and then, it’s remarkable how fresh Dead Cells can stay through all those hours. This game is a blast to play, full of visual splendor, and packed with things to do; don’t miss out on this one, it’s a must-buy.