I hate platforming games. I don’t know if I can express that enough. Yes, there are some that inject some alternative mechanics like Jonathan Blow’s Braid and The Odd Gentlemen’s P.B. Winterbottom, but for the most part they all have felt the same since their inception as a genre nearly 30 years ago. I think the last one I truly enjoyed was Contra III: The Alien Wars on the SNES in its heyday.
Game Developer magazine states “A successful game environment does four things: It teaches about the player’s relationship with the environment; in doing so, it directs and focuses the player’s behavior; generally it obscures this manipulation from the player; and so through the invoked behavior, it evokes in the player a certain mood or mindset.” Apparently Penny Bridge took a page from this book because they did so many of these things correctly in their new delightful release, The Deep Cave
