Developer: Daniel A. Ramirez | Publisher: Blowfish Studios || Overall: 7.0/10
Platformer Recipe: Jumping + killing + platforms.
Whipseey Recipe: Kirby + Mario + …Indiana Jones?
Whipseey and the Lost Atlas is a fairly simple platformer developed by one guy. It looks pretty good, plays fine, and is technically a pretty short game. You jump, kill stuff with your whip, and progress through stages before encountering a boss. There’s not a whole lot of complexity to it, really.
The main bulk of gameplay is actually going to come from replaying the same stages over and over. You’re given five lives to progress through the current stage, which has about 10 levels in it. Dying on a level will reset you to that current level as long as you still have lives left. If you die with no lives left, you reset back to five lives and the very first level of that stage. The intent is to get to the boss level with losing the least amount of lives possible so that you can use them up on attempting the boss. One could even say this idea is “retro.”
In reality, it is artificial lengthening of the content since there’s only a few different stages total. There are also ridiculous difficulty spikes on some levels that are a lot harder than they feel like they should be. Some levels after the hard ones are easier, which isn’t a typical difficulty progression and can get quite frustrating. There aren’t any power ups or things to help you progress if you seem to get stuck. The only thing the game provides in this sense, is collecting 100 coins which gifts you an extra life. However, most enemies only give you 3 coins, so it will most likely only help you once every other run. That isn’t much to make a difference since you don’t exactly have that much agency over when to cash in on that life.
The art is absolutely the best thing about the game, and if it didn’t look so cute I probably would have lost interest much earlier. The controls are tight enough when playing with a controller and the game runs smooth. The story is barebones as hell and a little baffling to see a human turn into a pink puffy thing and be named “Whipseey” despite already having a name as a human. The music also matches well.
The game is pretty inexpensive, and I’d say that it might even be something to let your kid take endless cracks at while you’re browsing Squackle for funny jokes and moderately informative game reviews. Overall, I’d recommend the title if you can get it for very cheap and want a distraction for about an hour.
