Garlic Review

 












A Tower of Difficulty-A Garlic Review

It's fairly rare that a new completely linear 2D platformer slides right under my radar, but that's exactly what Garlic did. In fact I only stumbled into it from a random YouTube video from a creator I had never watched before, so without further ado let's slice into Garlic and see what's hidden here. 

First Layers of Fun

Garlic wastes no time getting you into the gameplay. You'll immediately be introduced to the all-direction dash, ways to defeat enemies, and the story in mere minutes.
As for that story, it's fairly simple and humorous. You want to ascend the tower to met the cyber goddess and finish your journey. Throughout the normal platforming gameplay after certain levels and worlds, you'll play some little minigames akin to warioware where you can earn the goddesses favor. I love that Garlic doesn't pretend to have some grandiose story, it keeps it simple and out of the way. 

For anyone more experienced with these types of games, Garlic's level design is right up there with games like Celeste and Super Meat Boy. That is to say it's wonderful, and clearly presents every obstacle coming your way. I love the more forgiving mechanics of Garlic, particularly the lack of instant death. Some obstacles will hurt you sure, but not everything is so sure to kill you and send you back to a checkpoint so quickly. 


And this level of fairness keeps up for Garlic, all the way until the end. However the main point I'd like to draw is Garlic's strange difficulty curve.

A Steep Fall Off

For around 10 worlds of Garlic's total of 12, the experience is fairly difficult, but I found myself flying through it with little trouble. There's a slight jump at world 11 and then 12 features 10 levels that are far longer than anything else in the entire game. Garlic didn't pull punches, but in these final few levels, and even a stretch of levels where you have to use a pogo stick in an extremely frustrating trial and error style, it feels horrid. Finishing this game fully saw a vast majority of my playtime in these final levels, instead of evenly spread throughout the campaign.

The general difficulty of these levels wouldn't be that bad if acutely built up to, but instead it kind of just throws it all onto you. As of now, only 4% of players actually finished the game, and I can't say I'm surprised. These last few levels took a game that could've been six hours long and stretched it out to about 10 hours. In a review earlier this year I praised thumper for ramping up appropriately to such difficulties, but that level of polish isn't present here. 

I really enjoyed Garlic, but I feel like I'd be hard pressed to recommend it to many due to how abrupt and steep this lapse in difficulty is. I acknowledge its a hard thing to just fix, which leaves the game in a strange state of leading a player on to a certain expectation of difficulty only to left hook them with pain later on.

Verdict

Garlic is a wonderfully difficult 2D platform that merely fails to reach that nuanced difficulty curve of its peers. If you go in knowing this game will be crushingly difficult and not what the initial 10 worlds would let on, you can find a devilish little gem in Garlic. 

7/10-Great Yet Secretly Extreme 





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