Windswept and the Perils of Comparison Marketing
So last week, I streamed the demo of a game called Windswept, something I am assuredly late to the party on considering it was a Kickstarter game, but I was completely unaware of until I was linked a one of those "Market your game" tweets. In this case, it was the "Your game is too much like [insert property]. Your game: [insert gif]" and what they chose to lean on here is DKC. Now, I'm pretty fucking familiar with DKC by this point, so this caused me to raise an eyebrow and have a look at it. You can see the stream here, it takes up roughly the first hour or so to get through the entire demo, and to the game's credit, it is very close to DKC. The physics are very similar, the characters (and enemies) are all cartoony forest animals, and the way the "powers" are split up between Marbles (the duck) and Checkers (the turtle), it is not subtle about trying to be DKC3.
Now, we should be clear, the first chunk of the demo is clearly just the first three-ish stages of the game. They are very heavy on tutorials and are understandably not very interesting. There's an ice level that unlocks after the boss fight that is more difficult, but that's about the extent of the "standard" DKC stuff. And frankly, it kinda sucks? The level design itself could have come out of any platformer from the past 15 years, and adding a couple bonus rooms while asking you to grab 3-5 doohickeys along the way does not make a game "like DKC." As one person in chat put it, it's just bland, flavorless oatmeal.
...And then, if you get all the stuff in the ice level, you unlock a final brambles level, which to continue our food metaphor, is the equivalent of dropping a ghost pepper in that oatmeal.
This final level pops up a notice asking if you "want more of a challenge" and notes that it is level 20 (out of what I would later learn is 40). And it is a nightmare, something that got lost on its way to Celeste instead of anything you might normally find in a DKC-style game. Essentially, it asks you to make use of a mechanic where the turtle can do an air dash out of a ground pound, which gets refilled if you kill an enemy with it. The catch is that it's all taking place over a bramble maze where getting hit at all means instant failure and there's no ground except at the very start and at the checkpoint. Pure kaizo shit, in comparison to anything else the game asks you to do. And just so we're clear, as someone who does dabble in kaizo DKC at times, it is unequivocally the best level in the demo. I loved it.
But that's also the problem! DKC has certainly dabbled in this kind of design; hell, Bopopolis not only exists, it is both one of the hardest levels in Tropical Freeze, and probably the best one. But this is way beyond even what Bopopolis asks of you - the second half of the level asks you input the following sequence: Down in the air to ground pound, X to do the air dash at the right time, Y to interrupt the air dash and ready a team throw, jump out of that into the correct position, do a team throw over the next obstacle, land in a barrel cannon to reset the air dash, and repeat three to four times, all without ever missing an air dash, hitting the wall, team throwing up into the ceiling, or literally anything that isn't perfection. It is extremely technical and demands a lot of button presses very quickly.
Certainly, it is possible that this level is (hopefully) optional. While extremely fun for someone like me, it is not something that an average player is going to have much stomach for. Ideally, it would be a bonus level akin to the K levels in DKC Returns and Tropical Freeze. But even if it is, I'm still left with two questions: First, what the hell does the general difficulty curve look like? If we're starting with basic tutorials and then by the halfway point we have this, what does endgame look like? Is it even playable by folks who aren't hardened DKC veterans? But second, and probably more interestingly, this kind of thing is clearly only possible by utilizing mechanics that don't exist in those game. If the demo is anything to go by, the best bits of the game are the ones that explicitly are not DKC. Obviously not every level can, or even should be that difficult, but the developers clearly have some platforming chops to lean on. Why not just make something new, that isn't cribbing so hard from a set of mechanics that they aren't doing anything interesting with?
Or, if you prefer, why is a chef making oatmeal and then acting like that's the part of dinner I should be excited about?