I was hoppingly excited to see this offering on keymailer, from first glace it looked like a mash up of Alex Kidd, Mario, Sonic and Super Meat Boy. You can see the entire game played through in our first play here.

Its one of those games you walk into that has zero plot, just 30 levels (35 with tutorials). It doesn’t try to be anything it is not, but I would have really liked knowing why the bunny was called Auro, because I kept wanting to call it Arlo. Also will there be more games? Does Auro have a family? Why is there such a need for so much fruit? I NEED TO KNOW!

Graphically it is an uncomplicated and very pleasing affair, very 8-bit and for us set off a lot of nostalgia for all the games we grew up on.
I found one bug early on which I was able to recreate but once past that there were no other issues in terms of glitches to game play.

This is not an easy game. Especially if you are out of practise with this type of game play. Level 22 should have been totally the final level, once we got past that it was fairly easy sailing to complete the game. We did die a lot, though and it was nice to see the animation reflect the hazard that had killed Auro (and in terms of falling into the lava a burning noise).

There are several types of hazards to negotiate, including saws, swinging knives evil hidden traps (which do faintly give away where they are but are still hard to watch out for) and things that definitely look like whomps.

This game did reignite the argument in house Shiney about how much Sonic copied Mario or vice versa purely because of how the landscape looks.
Duck hasn’t played Super Meat Boy much but this also does have that ‘every level has to be done perfectly’ feel, especially when you have to slide down spike walls and bounce over to the other side (we might get Duck to play SMB at some point on stream).

There were a couple of elements to this game that did get irritating before the end. The ‘bounce’ noise was particularly jarring against the music and exactly the same for every action, as was the ‘ding’ for collection fruit (a bit like the Sonic ring noise but without the same depth). The rest of the soundtrack though was fine and really quite cute.

I really did like the look of the game, the fruit were easy to tell apart but maybe could have done with a little more variation – that said the minute I moaned about not having enough cherries we got them on the literal next level (how did it know…)! I liked the colour pallet, the change between night & day. It was just really cute (said it again).

In terms of what it is like to stream this game:

Pros
If you’re good at games like this, you look like a total boss
Everyone said it was cute
Most people in the stream said they would try this game

Cons
Viewers did complain about the bounce noise.
Being asked questions about plot, where there isn’t one
No set category on twitch, so no additional traffic.

This game is a cute way to spend an hour if you love games like this, or want nostalgia of the games you grew up on. I understand this was made by a one man dev team Vitor Melo who looks WAY younger than me. If this is the case I am really impressed with this game. 35 levels where you include tutorials and only one minor bug. This lovely game from Brazil was an excellent pallet cleanser after Egg King, and reminded us that great things really can come in small simple packages.

You can currently pick this up on sale on Steam for the tiny and worth it price of £1.01 but would still be worth it for the full price of £1.69. We did complete it in under an hour but really what other entertainment has such a low cost to high fun ratio. And this game was great fun, just zero real replay ability.

Shiney Rating
4 paws out of 5

Great little game, if you are of an age where you grew up with hard platformers, this is a great way to spend an hour and a total bargain for the price. Huge well done to the one man dev team, good luck with your future projects.