Platform game
Abbie Stone finds management is thrilled to have drill-equipped staff!
Poor Pepper. She’s the star of Devolver Digital’s new Drill baby, drill! platformer, but she would be laughed off the stage at the Annual Platforming Protagonist Awards. Not that she’d have much luck leaving that stage unassisted. Pepper’s hobbled with a pathetic jump, a mediocre little hop that can barely get her a few feet off the ground. So, it’s a stroke of good fortune that she’s rammed her arm into a drill attachment that can send her swimming through dirt, then use her momentum to burst out and fly through the air.
Well, maybe less ‘good fortune’, more ‘mixed blessing’ and perhaps even ‘get this damn monkey’s paw off me’. It turns out that having a drill for an appendage can be quite cumbersome. Pepper drills through dirt a little faster than you’d like, demanding quick reflexes to move in something close enough to the direction you wanted to go, or at least a route that ideally doesn’t end in certain death. This is all completely by design, of course, and gradually mastering such a joyously unwieldy method of navigation makes for a terrific little platformer.
Cumbersome as it can be, the drill is a delight to use, with excellent rumble feedback. This is a must-play with a controller, unless you own a vibrating keyboard. (Why do you own a vibrating keyboard? Actually, we’d rather not know.) Swimming through dirt feels great, as does introducing enemies to the sharp spinny end of your new toy. Comparisons to Game Boy Advance cult classic Drill Dozer are obvious, but it actually plays more like that same console’s Donkey Kong: King of Swing. That game was all about carefully timing swings to reach higher ground. Pepper Grinder plays a bit like this, if you were playing King of Swing with a dodgy emulator that quadrupled the game’s speed.
To exit a swing, you need to trigger the drill, sending Pepper skyrocketing. Levels soon become an acrobat’s nightmare of perfectly executed chains of swinging, drilling and hurtling yourself around. There’s even a speed boost that’s tragically mandatory to execute some of the more distant jumps. Pepper has four slivers of health that can disappear in the blink of an eye and a tiny window of invulnerability after taking damage. Thank Christmas there’s no lives system and mostly generous checkpointing, so this tricky platformer usually lands on the right side of challenging/frustrating. When you pull off a long, unbroken run of platforming, it gives you a similar sense of triumph to racing through a 2D Sonic level without dropping a ring, except success here feels much mor
