Penny's Big Breakaway


Oh wow, a quirky, 3D, but still linear platformer from fellas that made Sonic Mania? Awesome.

The Power In My Hands

I really like how this game controls. While you don't need too, this game let's you use the right-stick to dash and swing around in a way that I really like the feel of. Penny's moveset in general is very fun to use. She's very agile, with a double jump, wall jump, swing, and air dash, and she can pick up, maintain, and utilize speed pretty well when swinging, air dashing, and rolling around.


Points Point

There's an emphasis on points in this game, which I enjoy, but unfortunately it doesn't really enhance replay value. Collecting points in of itself is fun, since there's a combo system that encourages stringing together moves constantly, kinda like a skateboarding game. It adds a lot of depth to even when traversing basic terrain. Having your main method of gaining points baked into your moveset though makes it extremely trivial to grind for points, which I think really undercuts playing for high scores.

I did this a ton so I could easily unlock the concept art.

Similarly to a lot of other games I've talked about though, there's at least a solid infrastructure for speedrunning instead, and there are other ways I could challenge myself if I put my mind to it. I also wanna note that the Points system does work for the purpose of unlocking concept art. Sure, it's easy to break up level progression and grinding for points, but it's less tedious to get as many points as you can as you go through levels.


The Pace Of Nabbing

The world length is all over the place for some reason. Some worlds are only 2 levels long, while others have 4 levels + a boss fight. It makes progression feel kinda jarring.
 
Level lengths ballooned because I wanted to collect + unlock stuff. Without collecting or unlocking stuff, levels take like 4-5 minutes, but when I did collect + unlock stuff, levels were taking me like 20-ish minutes each.

I wasn't originally planning on collecting everything, since some Show Pieces early on took me like an hour to find, but I ended up pulling through anyways. The Show Pieces aren't usually aren't that hard to find or reach, but there were a few that left me quite confused.

I doubt this is the intended method to grab this, but it's the best I could come up with.

The missions were kinda annoying, because a ton of them have nonsensical fail states, and they're really punishing when you fail because you have to die in order to retry them. Some missions where you have to find things particularly annoyed me, because you fail them if you stray too far from the things you're trying to find, but because the whole point is that you don't necessarily know where the things you're finding are, sometimes it was hard for me to tell how far was too far. I guess the fail-states there did actually help in a way, since they clue in on where things aren't, but some sort lines or barrier to indicate missions' bounds would've helped more.
 
If I were to project my own experience onto others, I don't see people getting much out of the Shop. 1 item serves to get you more Coins for the Shop, while the other 3 serve to improve your survivability, but they don't improve it by much so I didn't care to buy anything. At least the Coins themselves increase the combo multiplier, so I was picking them up anyways.


Sega & The Saturn

I didn't watch very many trailers for this game, so I believe I only ever saw the first world before playing, and I didn't think much of the visuals at first since I didn't think much of that first world. That didn't last super long though because I thought world 2 was really pretty.
 
Here's world 5 as well because I also really like it.

This game's vibrant colors, relatively simplistic shapes, and fantastical map designs captures a sort of first-party Sega Saturn aesthetic that I find really pleasing. There's also some fun, cartoony animation, especially with the penguin enemies.
 


Progressing Death

The way enemies and hazards are designed is weird, especially when factoring in game progression. Instead of starting the game off with hazards and enemies that simply deal damage, and introducing things that kill you as you progress, this game kinda does the opposite. In world 1, there are 2 things that can kill you, penguins and bottomless pits, and nothing that simply deals damage. Stuff like electricity that just sits there and hurts to touch, or bottomless pits that you can roll across and jump out of aren't introduced until later.

The penguins especially are a really weird first/main enemy type. They're really easy to deal with because they're slower than you, most of your moves shake them off when they cling to you, and they don't actually catch you until 5 of them cling to you at once. They're really punishing when they do catch you though, killing you instead of just taking damage. They also can't be defeated through normal means of just swinging your yo-yo at them, instead you either need a specific power-up which is pretty uncommon due to how this game handles power-ups, or you just bait them off of a cliff. Because they need a group of 5 to catch you, they seem to always come in big hoards, and presumably because they come in big hoards, the devs seemed to be kinda selective with which level elements to mixes and matches the penguins with. At the end of the day though, I wouldn't call the penguins a bad enemy type, they have enough to make them interesting, and despite them being weirdly punishing, they're easy to deal so they do kinda work as a beginner enemy. This is how the difficulty scaling generally is in this game, it's weird, but it's designed in a way that works.


Loose Ends End Loosely

This game has a bit of jank. I wouldn't say it negatively impacted my experience a ton, but did give me some sour moments. Starting off, I have 2 things which I think are working as intended, but look really off. Penny has this tumble state for when she falls down a slope which feels really forced, especially on spherical and cylindrical platforms.


Dying to bottomless pits/water/lava doesn't have Penny animate in any particular way, so she can appear to walk out fine while dying.


There were like 4 times in which I clipped through walls which I imagine probably isn't supposed to happen.


This was an incredibly infrequent issue but, I got softlocked twice.

At least the music is bangin'
 
Lastly, the final boss did this to me once (I'm linking to the video instead of embedding it so y'all can avoid spoilers).


Wrapping Paper Text

Since Sonic Mania was such a success, and since they were so passionate about it, I figured the people who worked on it would've just made more Sonic games, but this is cool 2. A lot of the quirks with this game strike me as a result of the devs trying to be unique and experimental, and if that was the case then I think they succeeded. Admittedly I don't totally like the quirks though. Overall, I loved the game's style, and I had a pretty fun time engaging with Penny's moveset and the points system.



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