• Psycutlery
  

  22 hours playtime

  26 of 40 achievements

Platformer. Standard left/right movement+jump, but you can also do five short-hops in midair, after which they’re replaced by a brief hover move with a half-second cooldown until you land. One notable improvement over Psycho Waluigi is that grabbing things is much more reliable to do: you just have to point the D-pad in a direction and push the X button to throw your spork in said direction, and it’ll damage or grab whatever it hits. Unfortunately, this has the knock-on effect of making the controls slightly unresponsive since you can’t attack again until after the spork comes back to you, and many of the basic enemies unnecessarily take several hits to die/become grab-able.

Level design is okay, but just like its predecessor, the difficulty curve is inconsistent. In fact, for the most part, there isn’t much of a difficulty curve at all from level to level; the game instead mainly relies on different stage gimmicks to set its levels apart, especially the optional Gold Spork levels whose gimmicks rarely–if ever–get used again. Even when the difficulty does spike with some less-than-fair stuff, the game showers you with health pickups–and even frequently offers items that temporarily increase your max HP–so you’ll pretty much only ever get Game Over on the really unfair stuff, and even then, never more than once on the same thing (unless you try to get the “beat all levels with Max HP set to 1” achievement; that’d surely put the game’s problems in much sharper focus).

Each main level has three eye emblems, and you need to collect all three to unlock its Gold Spork counterpart level. Again, for the most part, these emblems are in places that are out of the way while still being intuitive to find, and if you do miss any, the checkpoint-select screen has the eye-slot glow when you have the cursor on the checkpoint before the eye in question (though the glow effect is subtle enough that I didn’t notice it until near the end of the game). Even when world 2 introduces invisible doors that don’t appear until you’re standing in front of them, the level design still clues you into their presence with an obvious nook or dead-end. However, there are a small number of emblems that are unintuitively hidden, notably the second eye in the world 3 boss’s level which requires you to throw stuff at a background object to obtain.

Overall, while the game does have some issues, it’s not too bad for a free game, so I can recommend it as long as you’re not an achievement hunter (and if you are, the game is also free on itch.io so you can try it without messing up your stats).

P.S. I tried out a bit of the postgame campaign that you unlock after beating the main game, and although enemies and eye-medallion-placement are different, everything else about the levels appears to be the same (including things like spike-placement), so the differences don’t amount to much when you consider you can now defeat all enemies in one hit anyway. Suffice to say, I don’t think I’ll continue playing that mode.