(Following up on this stream)
Sylvie Lime is a game available via Itch or Indiepocalypse which promises [from the Indiepocalypse description]:
- Turn into a lime
- Meet various girls in the computer and try to help them.
@Sylvie makes strange rule-breaking platformers (Girl Adventure is a personal favorite of mine) that remind me of the old Glorious Trainwrecks ethos that faded a bit into obscurity since Unity became the big thing and the members of the 2010 "queer indie scene" all… uh, let's say drifted apart. (Her style also shares a lot in common with Hubol, with whom she is a frequent collaborator.) The simplicity of these games is really refreshing and it's interesting that despite covering ground that was thoroughly explored in the GameMaker scene of a decade+ ago Sylvie still finds tons of entirely new ideas to cover. I always feel like I am learning something about game design when I play a Sylvie game. What I feel like I learned from this game is that turning into a lime is actually a very powerful mechanic with many interesting possibilities that video games have woefully underexplored until now.
Sylvie's main trick in her games is to just kind of program the mechanics of the platformer wrong, a little, or just not the way another game would do it, in a way that turns the basic act of moving around without losing control completely into a fascinating challenge all by itself. I feel like I just typed something kind of mean but I legitimately find this element of Sylvie games delightful. This game starts as a classic Sylvie platformer, leaving you barely able to move even a square from your starting point without dying and unable to reach the treasure chest which is just barely out of reach at the game's start. This is maybe a little bit off-putting to people who haven't played enough indie games to be accustomed to a game that initially presents a hard, unwelcoming exterior and wants you to work a bit to get at the moist game meat inside. What I would say is keep at it. Think of the mechanics as a puzzle: How can you use the verbs you have to get through the challenges you're presented with? There are a couple things that help here, one being that uniquely among the Sylvie games I've played Sylvie Lime gives you a kind of way around the platforming mechanics (no, not the lime), the other one being that repeatedly failing to do the simplest things in the first few screens is extremely funny.
If you can get past the first challenging bit Sylvie Lime rewards you well for it, with rich and cross-interacting mechanics that take the early platforming challenges (initially, unforgiving or even impossible) and crack them open in new ways; a lot of really interesting ideas about game design, presented in surprising ways; and combat(!) that is finely balanced in the best traditions of Mega Man and some fighting games.
Two more notes: Several people watching my stream mentioned watching the gameplay trailer helped them; I hadn't seen this before playing the game and I think it "gives away" several interesting techniques I enjoyed figuring out through the game itself. But, you might find it useful as a tutorial/walkthrough if you don't find yourself initially on the game's wavelength. (I do suggest giving yourself that experience of bouncing off it once before watching the video.) Finally, I played this game on a gamepad, but it uses many different keys from the keyboard; play however you want, but I found that trying to keep open joy2key (I used DS4win) and be constantly revising as you go trying out different mappings from your gamepad to the keyboard keys creates a very interesting sort of minigame. Can you design an optimal gamepad layout for Sylvie Lime? (You will still need to use the keyboard sometimes.)
There is a screenshot I took from my playthrough, which I was initially going to use as the header image from this post, but it's from a bit into the game so I didn't want to "spoiler" anyone just scrolling on Cohost. I think it communicates a lot about what this game is trying to do though. So you can find it after "Read more". ⬇️
