A short, boring platformer game with cheap mechanics towards the end of the game.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Platformer
Developer: Daniel da Silva
Publisher: SmokeSomeFrogs
Release date: 19 Nov, 2020
Intro
Bring Back The Sun by Daniel da Silva is a platformer game where you need to traverse the area to reach the exit. It offers a simplistic control where you only need arrow keys or WASD to move.
Visuals
The game has simple visuals. The main character is depicted as a square with one eye and two legs, while the environment consists of blocks and a door that acts as an exit. All blocks look similar with a slight difference to the special ones that help either as a story material or new mechanics for the gameplay. It might not look appealing at first, but it doesn’t look bad once you get used to it.
Story
There isn’t much to the story. You’ll receive a task at the start of the game and most dialogues will revolve around it, giving you a sense of progression. The changing backgrounds from white to red also help to make an impression that you are moving somewhere else, despite the game using the same blocks on all levels.
The Game
Gameplay
The game has its menu integrated with the gameplay. It was a bit confusing to navigate through it at first, although luckily, you won’t be exploring it for too long. However, it’s impossible to skip the credits because of this – you are forced to wait for a block to go down before you can move, forcing you to watch everything before exiting the area.
As a platformer game, the control is very basic. You can play it with one hand since you only need to move around and jump to control the character. However, the screen will follow your character when you jump, and your character jump surprisingly fast. It can be daunting for people who have no platformer experience to play in that state and people who have a problem with shaking screens won’t be able to enjoy the game at all. Heck, I even got a headache when I played it.
Mechanics
The game feels more annoying rather than challenging. You need to time your jump correctly every time, and failing will result in death. Some blocks are placed in such a way that you need to jump at the edge of the block, while some levels won’t let you see what’s beneath you when you are supposed to jump down. You’re bound to retry the level a lot of times because of these, although you’ll get used to it eventually. Half of the levels are there for you to test your platforming skills anyway, and they are very basic and boring if you are used to playing platformer games.
More mechanics will be introduced as you play the game, increasing the difficulty. While some are still easy to tackle, others are just cheap. There is a mechanic where you have to play the game upside-down, and jumping through the obstacles that require you to time your jump isn’t fun in this state. The biggest problem lies in one mechanic: rotating blocks.
The rotating block takes in a form of rectangle blocks that rotates both horizontally and vertically. While it doesn’t pose as a problem at first, some levels require you to stand on the same block while it’s rotating, whether it’s to the vertical or horizontal position. It isn’t easy to execute, and you have to try it several times to get it correctly. To make it worse, there is one level where you have to do this upside-down. It only appears on the last level though, so at least that’s a good thing.
Length and Difficulty
I finished the game in 1.7h. The game isn’t difficult except for the last ~5 levels. These levels require you to think a bit to utilize existing mechanics, whether to jump when a block is rotating or try to stand on the rotating block when it does the rotation. To be honest, they are more annoying than fun. The last level also makes it worse – it offers a long level with no checkpoints with some difficult mechanics in it. I even thought of quitting several times in the process.
Problems
Vanishing blocks won’t respawn, so you are bound to restart the game whenever you fail a jump.
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Verdict
The game feels boring to me. I usually got a soft spot to play simple, flash-like platformer games since they usually have a unique concept and fun to finish, but this game is just bland. Most levels only require you to have precise timing in your jump or some quick actions between jumping. The movement also feels stiff and the camera shaking that happens whenever you jump is too annoying with no option to disable it. If you want to play platformer games, I suggest you look elsewhere.
