Pepper Grinder was another game I've been eagerly awaiting ever since I say a trailer for it in a Nintendo Direct. The pitch of an intense, heart-pumping action platformer where you drill through everything in sight just felt so appealing, and the footage we saw looked super clean and polished. So, is it good?
The story is simple. Pepper crash-lands on an island and gets all her treasure stolen by thieves. She comes across a giant drill named Grinder, now take back your treasure by any means necessary. And by that, I of course mean by drilling through everything in your path. The controls are pretty simple, you can jump, dig into dirt, boost into the dirt, and occasionally just a grapple hook for certain stages. Drilling around feels incredibly tight and responsive, with a small turn radius and a perfect balance between chaotic speed and refined movement. This feels like the type of game that would completely fall apart if the controls felt even the slightest bit off, but thankfully, Pepper Grinder just feels perfect. When I first saw footage of Pepper Grinder, I immediately jumped to thinking about Drill Dozer, which is one of my favorite games. In some ways, they share a lot of the same appeal in terms of the sheer joy to wrecking everything with a giant drill, along with how you interact with pretty much everything through just that drill. However, in terms of the actual gameplay, Pepper Grinder is a much faster-paced game with a stronger emphasis on tight platforming.
The level design is also impeccable across the board. Each stage takes one or two central concepts and fleshes out as much as it can before moving onto the next. From a stage about launching yourself from cannons DKC style, to a stage where you climb up falling ice chunks, to a level where you drill through collapsing buildings to make yourself a path, to stages about attaching your drill to objects like a gun or a giant mech you can control, the levels feel consistently unique and varied without getting too varied. Every mechanic feels fittingly fleshed-out, and most of them even pop up again in later stages with the assumption that the player has already mastered them. The combat is also simple but effective, most enemies go down in a single hit so it's all about finding an opening and not getting hit by their own weapons. As for the boss fights, they're pretty solid too. Large-scale, brutally tough encounters that can feel like massive spikes in difficulty but are ultimately still pretty satisfying to defeat. On pretty much every level, Pepper Grinder is a thoughtful and masterfully designed game, challenging but fair. It perfectly nails the design sensibilities of the old-school Nintendo titles it claims to take inspiration from.
That being said, there seems to be one common criticism among most reviewers and it's that Pepper Grinder is too short. With only four worlds, each boasting around four levels and a boss, this is not a long game in the slightest, roughly comparable to Wario Land 4. While I don't feel Pepper Grinder is undercooked, and I'm glad it ended on a high note, I did find myself desperately wanting more by the time it was over. Just an extra world or two would've really rounded out the package. However, just like Wario Land 4, Pepper Grinder manages to mostly make up for its short length with lots of replayability. Each level has five big coins to collect, and three times to beat in Time Attack Mode. I'm not someone who usually does Time Attack, but I actually got really into it in Pepper Grinder because of how snappy the controls feel to use and how tightly the levels are designed. There's also a lot of stuff to buy and unlock, ranging from a secret level in each world, to costumes for Pepper, to stickers and sticker pages, to music track you can listen to while planting stickers. Since a lot of this stuff is locked behind Time Attack and a gacha machine, getting full 100% will definitely take you a while even if the campaign will probably be done with after a few hours.
As far as presentation goes, Pepper Grinder looks incredible. It goes for this chunky yet hi-res pixel art style, and it just looks so clean and fluid, so colorful and detailed. The explosions are massive, the drilling looks so intense and visceral, there's this really compelling fusion of serene-looking environments and unhinged action that I absolutely love. The character designs are also quite cute, from the charmingly animated Pepper to the goofy Narlings she faces off against. That being said, I do have one gripe and that's with the rumble. Pepper Grinder does have rumble and it definitely helps make the game feel more intense, but I honestly feel like there isn't enough of it. Taking full advantage of the Switch's HD Rumble may admittedly be a bit too much for a single indie dev, but I think this really could've been the perfect game for it, though that's a very minor nitpick. The game is still perfectly fine as it is. As for the music, Pepper Grinder sounds pretty great. It's got a pretty eclectic soundtrack that jumps around in genre quite frequently, but it's primarily composed of lo-fi and some absolutely gorgeous DnB music. I adore the DnB tracks, and they show up more and more as the game goes on and gets more intense. I'm very happy to see this genre making a comeback in games lately.
So yeah, Pepper Grinder is a really great game. It feels amazing, looks amazing, sounds amazing, and the level design is absolutely on-point. While I do wish we got just a little bit more of it, what we did get of Pepper Grinder is polished to a sheen. Once again, Devolver Digital found a good one.
4.5/5 Stars
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