A deeply mid experience. The drilling is fun for a level or two but it becomes very clear that this core mechanic does not have the mechanical depth needed to even carry it through its 4 worlds and sub 2 hour run time. It's pretty satisfying to go into the dirt and pop out once or twice but the areas you can dig really hinder the level design. They are essentially just linear lines. You go in one end of dirt and navigate your way to the other end. This then gets combined with a grapple hook that feels truly awful to use and the cannons from Donkey Kong Country. These cannons felt like archaic game design in the 90s and here they are now in the year of our Lord 2024. I mean I love stickerbrush symphony as much as the next guy but the cannons in this game don't even require you to aim or time your shot like 90% of the time.

Then whatever momentum you can muster is stunted by the constant stop and start of looking for these dumb collectibles which I would love to ignore but they literally lock levels behind collecting them. So many of them are hidden behind walls or off screen that it forces you to crawl through levels scanning every wall for subtle cracks. Their inclusion is in complete opposition to the core appeal of the game.

Idk, the girl looks cute and I assume the fine folks worked hard on the game, but this game was just so frustrating to play. I feel a lot of love put into it but not a lot of thought.

Honestly, Pepper Grinder feels like the most middle of the road modern indie game ever. It's never BAD in its 2 hour run time, but it never feels much deeper than a game jam project. The main flaw is the lack of depth in the central mechanic, but the bland pixel aesthetic and basic level design certainly don't help.

Drilling feels great, but its not really a mechanic that leads itself to any challenging platforming or combat sections, its just not interesting enough to be the central focus of the game.

While the gamefeel is strong, and it really feels like all of the effort went to making Pepper Grinder fun to control, the rest of the game just can't make up for it. There's no interesting levels that stood out, the bosses really stunk aside from the third one (where you basically fight yourself), and the difficulty was generally low but super uneven. I can't see myself replaying this one unfortunately.

Interesting little platformer, which in my opinion looks a little better than it plays. Not a bad game, but aside from the grinder mechanic there isn't much going on, say: there should be a much wider variety in level and enemy design and game mechanics to make it an actual good game. Every other mechanic aside from the grinder is just very underdeveloped. The boss fights were fun though, but they also need more variety, RNG, alternative attacks etc.

I love to see more by the dev (solo dev, i think), because they did a solid work on this game.

This is clearly a game that has a lot of depth to it. There are five different deck archetypes with substantially different play patterns, which can be either mixed and matched or played on their own to create a stunning diversity of builds. For better or for worse, I mostly didn't engage with those builds. I just beelined to the most broken thing I could find and smashed my way through the rest of the game.

To be clear, this isn't a complaint. I love a game that gives the player the tools to break it in half, and my experience even once I'd found a few infinite combos was far from rote. Between extra enemy health bars, death effects, and combo-disrupting status ailments there was still plenty of strategizing to do on my way to killing the final boss in a single turn. And the fact that I was able to strategize, overcome those obstacles, and win so thoroughly even so is a mark of quality.

I do still think this game does put a bit too much of a thumb on the scale towards the power of its high-end cards in story mode. Every color has at least a card or two (rare and demanding though they may be) that completely cracks open the economy, and since you carry a single collection through the entire game this means that most players will eventually have a deck of tremendous power even if it's not quite as broken as mine. In a way, the card set seems more tuned towards a run-based game than a collection-based game.

It's possible that this actually does address that issue. There's a run-based mode that I never got around to trying, and it may be that that's where the game balance most thoroughly shines. But if that's the case, why hide it away?

Great artwork and music.
I'd rather it was a normal rogue-like without persistent deck building. Because of that there is a giant powercreep and you have to grind booster packs.
Enemy design sucks though, gl spending 10 minutes in one room becuase of infinite reinforcement with revivals and self-destructs.

UPD: it gets better after a few runs, give it a chance

Anfangs war ich eher abgeneigt, weil die Karten selbst kaum aufeinander aufbauen. Stärkere Karten machen schwächere Karten grundsätzlich obsolet.
Aber das sorgt dafür, dass man Stück für Stück ein besseres Deck zusammenschustert, bis man endlich die Dungeons abräumen kann.

Am Ende braucht man jedoch starkes Glück, da bestimmte Situationen bestimme Moves voraussetzt.
3 Fernkampfgegner und du hast nur Nahkampfkarten gezogen? Pech gehabt, du bist leider sofort tot.

Eingeengt und du kannst du nur schießen? Pech, mal wieder tot.
Dazu ist die Hubworld MMO-RPG Freewaremäßig. Niemand sagt etwas sinnvolles, von 5 Leuten bekommt man Quests, also rennt man die ab und lässt den Rest stehen. Hätte man sich auch schenken können.

NOTE: only played the demo

another fun contribution to the genre, with just enough to make it stand out. the artstyle is nice, and i think the idea of having established characters is great, and i love the idea of character-themed decks.

unfortunately, something about it just didn't click with me. i think it was the feeling of drawing and using cards not satisfying me enough; i frequently found myself wishing i could do more with discards and draws. positioning also felt more like a chore than additional tactical depth.

maybe you see those features in the full game, but the demo didn't make me want to find out.

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.