The first genuinely pleasant surprise of my 2023.

Flywrench's core concept seems so simple in theory, yet is carried out so deftly despite how ankle-breakingly difficult the game gets. You steer this flying contraption that has to maneuver through these tight corridors and have to change to the correct corresponding color (white in neutral state, red when tapping and holding jump, and green when spinning the contraption and bouncing off of yellow walls) to successfully pass through while "platforming." There's not much complexity to the control scheme in terms of movement tech, but the controls are quite sensitive, to where you could sneeze on your controller or accidentally tap the jump button too quickly and you'd find yourself rocketing off into the ceiling. It's not the most elegant platformer out there given the sheer precision required to master the momentum physics, aerial drift, and the eternal struggle against gravity itself, but the raw and sloppy feeling quick-fire movement turns into this thing of beauty when you finally break through and start exploiting the game's systems, flying through levels like a speed demon with no regards for safety.

Without a doubt, this is the fastest platformer I've played to date. That's a good thing; all of the levels minus the final level in the Sun can be realistically cleared in less than 15 seconds (and most in half of that time even). The game never felt unfair in my eyes either, because Messhof does a great job carefully introducing each new related concept (the jump, then the spin, then unpassable pink line barriers, then switches and moving obstacles, etc) and really fleshing out the obstacle escalation to its maximum potential with so many different combinations. The difficulty thus stems less from overwhelming the player with hazards all at once or lengthening levels to punish more heavily, and more from utilizing trickier variations of obstacles to create tighter execution barriers. Since levels are over in a blink of an eye and death is just a quick fade out animation that immediately reloads, there's essentially no time to rage when you've already respawned for another go.

I've always thought that I understood the "controls as an extension of the body" theory, but Flywrench is the first game that really forced me to experience it in action. It's such a blindingly quick experience, that even if you can see the levels coming right at you with the brightly color coded hazards and imagine completing it in your head, it ultimately comes down to a test of pure reaction time. It's less about trusting your inherent skill as a player, and more about throwing your inhibitions away, forgetting about execution/input barriers, and melding with the vessel itself and just doing it outright. You don't really have time to consider the play by play for something as condensed and quickfire as this game; you just have to make it happen. I honestly can't really say any other game has ever put me in this headspace.

It's not a perfect experience: the difficulty spike in the last world (Mercury) is very noticeable as it took me about an hour to clear everything prior and almost two hours to clear Mercury alone, the game has some occasional strange stuttering and frame rate drops which causes extremely noticeable chugging since the game's logic is tied to the frame rate, and the final level feels a tad bit out of place since it's significantly longer than any other level in the game. Despite that, Flywrench is definitely the best "arcade" 2D platformer that I've played to date, and it's somehow criminally overlooked despite being by the creators of Nidhogg. The simple yet distinct energetic retro visuals and the absolutely fire soundtrack only further highlight how this is unlike anything that I've ever played before. Definitely give this a shot if you're looking for a succinct rush of adrenaline that puts practically every other precision platformer I've ever played to shame.