Pepper Grinder Review

ign.com:

To describe a game as being a non-stop grind from start to finish would be considered a negative in almost any other context, but not in the case of Pepper Grinder. This energetic platforming adventure straps a high-powered drill to your hand and throttles you forward through a series of terrain-churning 2D paths littered with enemies to pummel and challenging platform sections to navigate at speed. It’s lively, fluid, and frequently frantic, and folds in some fun diversions that help each stage stand out, even though a surprisingly short list of levels means that Pepper Grinder is here for a good time rather than a long time.

The setup is simple: a young girl named Pepper washes ashore on a mysterious island crawling with narwhal-like creatures known as the Narlings, gets unceremoniously dropped to the bottom of a cavern, straps on a power drill (and gives it the grooviest of Bruce Campbell-like revs) before riding a wave of mutilation through the monster army and gathering enough gemstones along the way to bedazzle a pair of Beyonce’s boots. From there it never stops feeling great to steer the pint-sized Pepper through sand and soil like a gas-fuelled groundhog, before emerging at an enemy’s feet to give them the spikiest of surprise attacks.

Yet although it involves carving holes through rock and dirt with a runaway power drill, Pepper Grinder’s momentum-based movement doesn’t exactly break new ground. It actually feels highly reminiscent of Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, only with turf in place of surf; swapping out bodies of water for suspended chunks of earth to form the basis of an adventure that’s less about landing precisely on the top of platforms than it is tunneling straight through them. Still, although it may effectively be an echo of an Ecco, Pepper Grinder successfully stands on its own thanks to the sheer variety of challenges to be found in its stages. In one you might get a literal helping hand between platforms from a friendly giant, while in another