I caught wind of Unicycle Legend back in March when I watched the trailer for it, said "heh", and retweeted it, reserving it on the App Store for the price of 0 yen.
the game popped up on my phone this morning after quite a long wait, and during a 45-minute-each-way trip to pick up a 1000y used rice cooker (complete with original receipt and a bonus snack bar courteous of a very nice seller), I played it through basically in an afternoon
and my final review remains: "heh"
Unicycle Legend is a physics-based comedy puzzle-platformer where you attempt to navigate a reasonably unwieldy unicycle from point A to point B without falling over. the closest analogue I can think of is the What The Golf genre, where half the fun is solving a physics puzzle and the other half is being delighted by unexpected verbs and nouns
here, the bones are fairly bare - the music from the trailer doesn't play in-game, there's no best-time records, and no particular credits behind naming the last two levels "how the developer felt launching the game" (mood) and "thanks for playing" - but it is a functional entry in the genre.
personally, the game had a bit of a Bro Atmosphere that I didn't jive with - the commentators are a little too snarky when you fail, all the unlockable outfits are male-coded so you cannot be a feminine yellow rectangle, there are spiders in the game for some reason? (they're not an obstacle that present a new challenge to your skill. they're just spiders. this was also in the trailer so it's on me for missing it) - but in terms of spending two hours or so qwopping around on one wheel, you hypothetically could do much worse
the skill ceiling for the game comes fairly early (once you learn to YOLO, it solves a good chunk of the game) and the puzzles don't have a particularly steep nor inventive difficulty curve (often they bounce around between concepts), but I definitely did get caught off guard in comic fashion a handful of times, and the game's leniency for level clears makes for some good screenshots.
medium story short, you can tell from my wording that there's a lot I would be happy to see improved in the game, but as a free product made by a creator with like 600 followers, it's like hey! you made a complete game and launched it, and me, some rando who is posting about Rei Batsubami from Kakegurui 18 hours a day, saw it randomly and played through it! props to you!
(looking at the RTs, I think it was a purely algorithmic recommendation with zero people in my circle in the engagements for the tweet)
so yeah my two main thoughts today
- physics is always funny, though relying on physics for your game will make your game a Physics Game
- make things and ship them