The End Is Nigh is a very difficult platforming game made by the same guy who made Super Meat Boy and the Binding of Isaac. The game’s aesthetic is more reminiscent of the latter, while the gameplay is heavily reminiscent of the former.
A highly difficult platforming game, you play as Ash, a black blob with one good eye. He can run, jump, swim, and do a sort of butt slam attack into theThe End Is Nigh is a very difficult platforming game made by the same guy who made Super Meat Boy and the Binding of Isaac. The game’s aesthetic is more reminiscent of the latter, while the gameplay is heavily reminiscent of the former.
A highly difficult platforming game, you play as Ash, a black blob with one good eye. He can run, jump, swim, and do a sort of butt slam attack into the ground that accelerates his rate of downward motion and can smash through breakable ground. He can also hang off of ledges and do a longer horizontal jump while doing so that will also smash through breakable sections of wall.
The game starts with Ash playing a nigh-impossible retro-platforming game. Given the great difficulty, the player is very likely to die… and the moment they do so, the game glitches out and breaks, and Ash goes out into the world to make a new friend now that his video game cartridge is busted. The world is a post-apocalyptic hellscape, rendered in the style of a place full of tumors and black blobby enemies and spikes.
You can’t kill enemies in this game; indeed, contact with any black blob enemy will instantly kill you. There are some enemies – signified by having white skulls – that you can jump on the heads of to propel yourself up into the air. The game is mostly about environmental challenges, though, and avoiding the enemies – springs, spikes, collapsing buildings, and similar challenges are the barrier between you and getting to the next screen. There are sections of the game where you swim around, including in boiling water that will kill you within a few seconds, so you have to get out of it quickly.
The game’s mechanics are on the whole simple and relatively straightforward. Your challenge on every screen is to make it out onto the next screen; there are optional challenges, in the form of both harder-to-reach tumors sitting around in mostly-obvious spots in the levels, where the challenge is to get to them, and secret side areas, which are hidden off of the main path and which contain mega-tumors (5 tumors) or game cartridges at the ends of them. These paths are much harder than the main path, and the paths which conceal later game cartridges are amongst the most difficult parts of the game.
The game cartridges are an alternative collectable that allows you to play a “retro” style game, pixel graphics, where you must navigate through levels which are even harder than the main game. These, too, award you with tumors for completing them. Unlike the main game, many of these also have limited lives, meaning you only can fail 20 times before you are kicked out and have to start over on the minigame (and you must fail fewer than 10 times to get a bonus tumor).
While the main portion of the first half of the game does not have limited lives, in the second half of the game, the player’s tumors become extra lives, refreshed every time the player reaches a checkpoint – once every 20 levels or so. Because the second half of the game is much harder, this greatly encourages the player to collect those tumors, and the final level of the game subtracts a whopping 450 tumors from your total (out of only about 500 or so in the whole game), making the final section of the game much more difficult to complete without getting kicked back to the start of the area.
Unfortunately, this game feels like a less good version of Super Meat Boy – but ironically, not directly in terms of gameplay. Ash plays differently from Meat Boy, but he works well and the levels are, on the whole, interesting to complete.
The biggest problem is the level select and the collectables. The levels are almost all linear, but you can only go to the first of 20 levels in an area, and then push your way back through all the others in that area if you want to collect a missed collectable. This strongly encourages the player to collect every collectable on the first time through an area, or else forces them to tediously re-complete the area while searching for them.
The other problem is that the game has very little in the way of a sense of progression. There’s only a handful of cut scenes, rather than the one after every section of levels that you saw in Super Meat Boy, and beating one area just leads onto another, harder area, rather than any sense of reward. This gives the game a feeling of monotony; what are you accomplishing here? Nothing, really. And the second half is even worse because there is no clear goal – you just go out and do platforming sections. While this doesn’t seem like it should matter, it somehow does, and it diminishes the game as an experience having no real sense of progress or a meaningful goal.
Not being as good as Super Meat Boy doesn’t make it bad, and indeed, I had fun with it overall. But this is definitely not a game for everyone.… Expand
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