At the end of the day, this is a very simple game and it mostly does what it sets out to do well enough. It doesn't have the purity and streamlined design of something like Geometry Dash, and yet I found Bit.Trip to be a much more enjoyable experience than Geometry Dash because it doesn't feel the need to get unplayably difficult right off the bat. On the surface, Bit.Trip feels like a pretty mid game; nothing too bad, nothing too good, it's all just... adequate.

That's not to say I didn't have any more significant issues with this game because I definitely did, but they mostly ended up being rather specific. While I found the level design to be quite good (decent use of repetition without becoming stale, interesting mix of obstacles, etc), the overarching difficulty game is rocky to say the least. In particular, level 1-11 is an absolute nightmare. It's by no means the hardest level in the game (although it is by far the longest), but placing it at the end of an introductory world filled with pretty trivial levels for the most part is just sadistic, and led to one of the most abrupt difficulty spikes I think I've experienced in gaming.

I also don't really get on with the aesthetics in this game, or how they impact the moment-to-moment gameplay. For starters, the game is so heavily pixelated that I had to learn how to read the HUD, because none of the characters looked like the letters or numbers they were supposed to. I also don't like how similar the colour pallets for the foreground and background are in large parts of this game, as it can make it very difficult to make a snap judgement as to what is a hazard in some of the more challenging levels. In fact the use of colour in general is overall poor in this game. It feels like colour could be used to convey player information (e.g. all kickable objects could be blue, all objects that need ducking under could be black, etc); the game does do this, but only with 2 or 3 of the many types of obstacle, and most of the time working out the correct way to deal with a hazard is left to educated guesswork or trial and error.

The most heinous misuse of colour though has to be with the little squares you have to use the shield for in World 3, which are coloured the same as the gold bars you are supposed to collect. The game spends 2 whole worlds conditioning you that hitting gold objects is a good thing, only to sadistically 180 at the last moment. When I'm in a flow state in this game my lizard brain is 100% in control, and it simply cannot differentiate between two small identically coloured objects in the 1/10th of a second you have to process information in the more hectic parts of this game. Honestly this feels like a deliberate choice to fuck over the player, and it's not the only one; Bit.Trip Runner also loves to have obstacles fly at you from off-screen so unreasonably quickly that the only way to deal with them is to just learn exactly where they all are. It really goes against the sense of flow and rhythm that this game can create at it's best; I think the 'haha fuck the player' attitude present in many of the early indie titles is nearly always a mis-step, but especially in a game like this where it seems completely antithetical to its specific brand of gameplay.

I think the game also hates anyone who would be interested in 100%ing it as well. If you collect all the aforementioned gold bars in a level you get a 'perfect' score for that level and a little badge for it, which is a nice reward for opting in to a bit of extra challenge. But you also get a bonus level. These bonus levels are obtusely long, deliberately awkward and incredibly uninteresting... and you need to get all the gold bars in the bonus level too to get a true perfect score on a given level and an even nicer badge. Missed one or two gold bars in the bonus level? Well then you'd better go get a perfect score in the original level again, because that's the only way to have a second go at the bonus. In a game that so heavily relies on trial and error, having such a hurdle be in the way of retrying content is just agony, and makes any effort you put into getting regular perfect scores feel completely wasted.

All this makes it sound like I hated Bit.Trip Runner, but I really didn't. At times I did (1-11 can continue to go fuck itself), but my issues with the game were mostly surmountable roadblocks rather than persistent problems. Once I learned to give up on 100% and treat this more as a memorisation game than a reactive one, I started to get a lot more out of this. I am glad to have played it, but I do think this is still one I'm going to remember more for its failings than for its successes.

Played via The BIT.TRIP release on a PlayStation Vita OLED model.

This is a review of two halves - one for the game itself which is an addicting reaction-based runner that looks and sounds great but suffers from a little too much reliance on memorisation for bullshit you have no idea is about to happen. With those few exceptions in mind the rest of the game rides the fine line of the player being the fuck up with no fault of the game, which is an impressive feat.

The other half of my review pertains to the version I had the displeasure of playing - the Vita release, as part of The BIT.TRIP package which bundles the first five games of the series together. This version suffers from really bad framerate issues; not entirely noticeable at first, but when there are specific obstacles or background entities on screen such as a long string of the wall worms in the first world or the mining characters in the second, performance just tanks to low 20s at best and it really throws you off both your rhythm and what you can see coming. I managed to push my way through to the third world after 4 hours but all of the issues culminate here where smooth framerates just don't happen any more and I can't keep bashing my head against this brick wall of a shoddy porting job any more.

This is a good game that I might revisit again sometime but for the love of god avoid the Vita version as much as possible.

I like the aesthetics, the general controls feel really good and when it clicks it really clicks. Unfortunately the later levels in this game really annoyed me requiring a lot of trial and error and super precise jumps to be well positioned for obstacles that weren't even on screen. I wouldn't have minded if the levels were much shorter, my breaking point was one of the taking up almost two hours of my time. At that point I had enough as the later two levels I didn't do looked more of the same. It's a solid game but I really wanted to like it more

A cute little rhythm game that's pretty strict on reacting and learning the stage patterns! Bit.Trip Runner was a fairly early highlight in the indie sphere, despite first coming to fruition on WiiWare (whatever that was).

As someone that doesn't care for chiptune music most of the time, I actually found the soundtrack in this game very endearing. It has this atmosphere that's a little hard to pin down why I like it so much, but it fit the world perfectly. Not exactly ideal as a game that featured stereoscopic 3D, but I chipped time away on my 3DS with it either way.