Pepper Grinder
In a good way! The superb drilling of PEPPER GRINDER is sublimely chaotic
Poor Pepper. She’s the star of Devolver Digital’s new 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 by 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 of me’. It turns out that having a drill for an appendage can actually 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.
BUMPY RIDE
Cumbersome as it can be, the drill is a delight to use, with excellent rumble feedback. This is an absolute must-play with a controller, unless you own a vibrating keyboard (why do you own a vibrating keyboar… actually, I’d rather not know). Swimming through dirt feels great, as does introducing enemies to the sharp spinny end of your new toy.
Stages soon introduce a swinging mechanic and then they 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 Christ there’s no lives system and mostly generous checkpointing. Maybe a few more checkpoints wouldn’t go amiss either, as some of the late-game levels boot you back far enough to have me fantasising about introducing the drill to the developers backsides, but now I’m just being childish. And creepy. Er, sorry.
Cumbersome as it can be, the drill is a delight to use
Pepper Grinder breaks up this demanding platforming by offering you gloriously silly extensions to your drill arm. You’ll occasionally find a gun with infinite bullets that turns the game into Gunstar Heroes with the cheats on. Even those sections play like Elden Ring compared to the giant mech suit that lets you smash through all the scenery. At first these sections feel like payoffs for surviving this far, a few seconds of cathartic, brain-off destruction. But later levels weave these gadgets elegantly into the challenge, taking adv
