so i finally finished penny's big breakaway! it took me a while because i'm an insane person and i wanted to get all the collectibles and concept art unlocks for each level before i moved on, which took me about 20 hours all told.
a thing that's striking about penny's big breakaway: there's been a lot of discussion about what type of platformer it actually is. is this a 3d sonic game? is it a mario-like? is it mostly like dynamite headdy? well after 100%ing it, seeing how the hardest challenges in the game are structured, and watching the devs play it, i've come to the conclusion that more than any of those things.... this is a tony hawk game.
more specifically, it's a tony hawk game with linear, rather than open levels. what i mean by that is that more than anything else, the point of the game is to string together long sequences of moves as combos, and take those combos over long distances.
there aren't a lot of games that approach movement systems in this way! so there's not a lot to draw from when you want to think about how they work and what makes them fun. but something i think a movement combo game needs is friction points.
imagine playing tony hawk without the balance meters (or, remember playing it without the balance meters, if you were also once an 8 year old who just found out what a cheat code is). it's actually... not that fun anymore, not for long anyway. for a long combo to feel meaningful, it has to have failure points!
so what failure points are in penny? there's a fairly strict input buffer system, meaning that if you're in the middle of the end of one animation and you press the button for the next thing you want to do, it might not come out at all, because the game wants you to be more precise with your input timings. there are certain moves that have longer endings than others, for instance your regular yoyo throw in the air, which leave you with a pretty tight timing window to get your tony hawk manual out before you hit the ground. there's a separate "tony hawk manual but in place" option, but the input for it is more difficult, and it requires that you spend all of your aerial resources before you can even do it.
and interestingly, that's the stuff that gets criticized most often by people who don't like the game. but, i don't think the game works without it. there have to be points where the combo is likely to fail! and once you've identified those points and practiced the solutions for them, they feel viscerally satisfying to clear in a way that combo chasing just wouldn't otherwise.
there could probably be more study in how to design these points of artificial friction in ways that are less likely to frustrate certain players, but for now, they work, they're fun, and i like them!
also in closing, the game's got an out of this world unique visual style, delightful character design, super fun soundtrack etc etc but you knew all that already.
