If there is one thing the Nintendo Switch is not lacking of its great indie games. It seems like there is a never ending stream of titles fromIf there is one thing the Nintendo Switch is not lacking of its great indie games. It seems like there is a never ending stream of titles from developers you have never heard of cranking out titles that deserve more attention. And hey, here is another, Curse Crackers for whom the belle toils. Curse Crackers originally released last year on steam, but I found out about the switch version after seeing a tweet from Colorgrave, the developers of the game a few months back and decided I wanted to give it a go.
You may look at curse crackers and see the pixel artstyle and hear the music and just immediate go to oh great, here is ANOTHER retro inspired indie platformer on the switch, and while that is clearly true, Curse crackers really sets itself apart with its fantastic movement. It sounds dumb but the word that kept coming to my head when trying to describe the movement in this game was locomotion. So lets just pretend I used that thoughtfully and intelligently in the previous sentence.
As I mentioned previously you control Belle, a former acrobat, alongside your sentient … bell… named chime. Belle and chime, very charming. Running and jumping as belle feels great, good speed, lots of jumping options with high jumps, quick long jumps, the ability to bounce off obstacles and enemies, but chime is really what makes the LOCOMOTION in this game feel just that much more fleshed out.
You can throw chime in any direction as you run along through the levels, and at first that makes for your basic attacks on enemies, taking them out from a distance before you have to worry about dodging them, but what throwing chime is really good for is extending belles movement options because you can bounce off chime too. If you have played mario odyssey, think of how mario throws cappy to bounce off and extend his movement range, now belle cant capture and turn into enemies, but she sure can capture my attention with the creativity allowed through all her movement options.
Levels are anywhere from 3-8 minutes long, depending on how fast you want to run through them. You can go slow and be methodical looking for all the collectibles hidden throughout, or you can hold that sprint button and start chaining together moves to get through in no time flat. A lot of the levels are really smartly designed with enemy and obstacle spacing allowing you to perfectly go from one enemy head bounce to the next and the next and so on if you are pulling it off right. I tend to play slow on the first run through and try and find all the secrets I could, but it was a hell of a time going back to the early levels and try to beat them as fast as possible.
Checkpoints are pretty frequent, but even if you fail to make it to the next floating balloon checkpoint thing, respawning happens so fast it almost doesn’t feel like a punishment. The game lets you keep playing, no time to pick up your phone or get distracted between attempts. There are no lives in this game, so don’t feel bad if you do get stuck on a harder jump, nothing to sweat.
There is more to the game than just going from level to level. Between stages you get to walk around an overworld map spread across several areas each with a unique theme and places to stop into and talk to npcs, see some of your collectibles, or pick up side quests. All of this is completely optional though so if you just wanna mainline level after level there is nothing stopping you. Personally, I didn’t even finish a full sidequest until after I rolled credits. These sidequests are a good time because they can unlock special items for you to change up the game with and let you play otherwise hidden levels that are a little tougher to take on than the main ones.
Talking to the side characters in these areas can be fun, but I did not feel like it was super important. The dialogue can be pretty charming, but I wouldn’t say you are missing out on a whole lot if you skip all of this entirely. It can definitely be a good change of pace though if you just beat a couple hard levels and just want to relax and understand the world better.
One of the coolest places in the game is in the main hub town that has a majority of the npcs, off in the corner is the library. There you can go read all of the pretty well hidden lore books that act as collectibles in the main stages. You can actually read lore entires for each of these and while I did not get super deep into the lore, nor do I think I really wanted to, as I was mainly here for the jumpy jumping, but it was really cool to see how much care went into adding that much more depth into the world for those who do want to read about it and talk to all your friendly townsfolk.Along the way you will run into some not so friendly folk in the form of bosses. A couple bosses per area every few levels or so, nothing too crazy, but I really had a good time with these. Bosses can be as straight forward as your typical jump over the shockwave, run under their jump ...… Expand
