This is a platformer. Left/right move (though turning around is delayed by about half a second), A button jumps, X attacks, L button does a ground-pound, and R button grabs/throws objects. If you’re walking when you push the attack button, you’ll do a roll, and if you roll off a platform, you can jump in midair like in Donkey Kong Country. If you push the attack button in midair, you’ll spin around and hover for a second, which is NOT an attack unless you buy a late-game upgrade. Underwater, you can move in any direction, and pushing the attack button does a dash forward, even if you’re not moving (and beyond breaking boxes, it also isn’t an attack). Each level has 5 coins hidden in them, and you’ll need to collect at least some of them in order to unlock future levels. While it isn’t too bad trying to get them on your first run through the levels (especially since they’re numbered based on their locations in the level), every now and then you’ll play a level where you completely miss one coin with no clue where it could be, and you don’t have the option to buy a secret-detecting upgrade until late-game.

The hub has a top-down perspective instead of a side-view, so you can also move in any direction, though there’s significantly less platforming in the hub, and your hub-jump-height is only one unit. Instead, the hub is mostly just switch-hunts to collect tonics (can be upgrades, cosmetics, or challenges that give you extra currency) or switch-hunts to unlock each level’s alt mode. They’re supposed to be alternate versions of the same level, but the differences can range from negligible (ooh, the conveyor belts move in the other direction! and that’s it!) to the alts being entirely different levels. In between, there are alts that share some rooms but have unique ones, and while they don’t irritate me as much as the ones that are basically just the same level again, you can still see paths to the alt’s rooms in the main level, so you never know if you missed a secret or if it’s a come-from. Still, even the negligible alts have some incentive to play them (and not just because you’d never know which are which until after you try them): each of the alts have 5 coins of their own (the original coins won’t show up in alts, not even in shared rooms) as well as a different bee to rescue, though personally, I’d rather the levels just have no alts and the completely-different alts be turned into their own levels. Secret exits are worse since they tend to be near the end of levels (usually between coin 4 and 5) and have their own bee, so you’d essentially be playing those levels twice to get both the secret exit and the normal exit, as well as the coin you never had a chance to get.

While the name might make you think the game is all about that challenge, the game is actually very forgiving. Not only is the game’s difficulty curve quite low, but hitboxes are also a bit smaller than you’d think (there were a few times I thought I’d get hit by an enemy but didn’t). There’s even an enemy type that won’t hurt you at all, instead just bouncing you off it, but you can still jump on it and kill it. Also, I spoke about the rolling air-jump earlier, but even if you just walk off a platform normally, the game’s very blatant Coyote Time will still let you jump, even if your character has visibly already started falling (ironically, no input-queue for if you push jump a few frames too early before landing, which IMO has more merit than Coyote Time). If you do manage to get hit, you don’t lose HP or anything; instead, your bat companion starts flying around, and if you touch the bat again, you go back to being able to take another hit, like the rings in Sonic. Honestly, the real punishment for losing the bat isn’t that you now have one-hit deaths, but that you can’t ground-pound or air-dash, both of which are required to access certain secrets. Still, even if you do lose the bat, there are bells scattered throughout the level that’ll call the bat back (though they are one-time use), and if you manage to die despite everything (admittedly, there are some instant-death traps like pits and acid), the levels have reasonably-spaced checkpoints so you’re never redoing too much, and you always respawn with the bat back.

Oh, and if you manage to die enough times on a single section, the game gives you the option to skip it.

Still, despite all the game does to be easy, the game manages to have some cheap moments every now and then. For example, one of the alts puts you in front of a vertical laser that’s slowly chasing you, so you think you have time, but when you collect the 1 coin and try to go back to the main path, you’ll see the laser come back on screen moving very fast all of a sudden and it’ll kill you (it’s an instant-death hazard). The game has a vine-climbing mechanic that isn’t introduced until level 13 (out of 17, not including alts), yet level 14 decides not only to model-swap the vines, but also give no clear indication that they’re climbable as well since they’re only introduced suspended beside a pit, so when you realize they’re not a platform, you’d think “oh, I have to jump over the pit” but no, you can suddenly grab on cross-stitched ropes in the background. The game also has stage-exclusive gimmicks, and even alt-exclusive gimmicks: level 9’s alt has updrafts that’ll push you up, but sometimes, they’ll switch off before you get above the jump-through platform, even though you can’t jump in an updraft and they’ve very-clearly been established NOT to be timing-based (they’d only turn off so there’s no collision problem with the platforms); turns out, the game expects you to figure out that you can hold up and down to slow/speed up your ascent, even though they’ve only just now been introduced and you’ve never even had to do that in this level except for that one spot where the game disables the updraft a bit too early.

EDIT: The game also has quite a few points where you need to just wait on stuff. Wait on a platform to come back, wait on a platform to spin around so the spikes aren’t pointed up, wait for an enemy to walk by the coin so you can bounce on the enemy to collect the coin…I really don’t get why devs still do this.

As for the titular Impossible Lair, it’s definitely a difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game (to the point where some traps don’t really feel like they were built around the game’s less-than-perfect controls) and there are only three checkpoints, so dying means you have to redo quite a bit more than you would in other levels. That said, all the bees you collect from the game’s main levels act as your HP in this level, so even though everything in the level can technically be avoided, you can still tank hits for those moments that maybe require a bit more precision than the controls allow, or when the game still introduces new gimmicks despite this being the last level and you’re not given the time to get the hang of them before being put in danger. I can’t say I’m a fan of this approach, and I also don’t like how much you have to go through to get to the next checkpoint, but I will praise one thing: each checkpoint saves how many hits you’ve taken, so if you do especially bad on one part, you can either keep trying with how much HP you had when you got there, or you can go back to an earlier checkpoint and try to get through that part with more HP. I’d actually had a similar idea for a while, though it’d be applied to something like Mibibli’s Quest so that each room would be a checkpoint without just letting the player tank everything; its implementation in this game leaves something to be desired, though.

EDIT: Oh, and the level disables your equipped tonics without warning, so that could lead to another cheap hit before you realize what happened.

Overall, the game isn’t bad, but I can see how it ended up being an Epic freebie. Wait for a sale.