Panic Porcupine Review

Panic Porcupine is a 2D momentum-based platformer developed by Spicy Gyro Games and inspired by the Sonic games of yesteryear. You play as the porcupine, Panic, who gets an infinite life ability at the start of the game so he can begin his quest to defeat an evil scientist from stealing all of the chickabirbs. The chickabirbs are this title's collectable — and you will need to collect a certain number of them in each level in order to complete it. There isn’t much of a story here at all, which is fine because this is a platformer and bogging the experience down with lengthy cutscenes and an engaging plot is unnecessary. This title is both inspired by Sonic and a parody of it — and there’s even a jab at the blue hedgehog’s movie career.

Panic Porcupine wears its classic 90s vibe on its sleeve – and that’s refreshing because I’ve been getting tired of all these high-budget releases in the industry as of late. Playing a game like this is an excellent palette cleanser before the floodgates open with a laundry list of 100-hour videogame experiences. However, Panic Porcupine still needs to be judged on its own and not what has been happening in the industry lately, which is what we will do right now. The first thing I noticed when picking it up was the tight and responsive controls. It’s obvious the developers spent a lot of time fine-tuning how Panic feels to control, which is great to see because when you’re playing a platformer all you’re doing is running around, so getting the movement right should always be done first. Of course, you’re not just running in a straight line but also going up and down hills and through loops or even operating a giant seesaw. Panic can also roll at all times — much like his muse — which can be helpful to gain an insane amount of speed speedrun through a level if you feel like it. There isn’t much in terms of complexity, but the simplicity of the mechanics more than makes up for the lack of a bucket's worth of moves, just like Super Mario Odyssey. Panic level design is pretty good too, and the final levels of each world do a nice job of testing the player on what they have previously learned.

Unfortunately, some puzzling design decisions impede the otherwise responsive controls and dizzying speed. For some reason, the developers chose to have the camera pulled far away from the action at all times — making it extremely hard to see what was happening while playing on the TV. Making matters worse are the visuals, which are pretty to look at, and there is some nice variety to be found from world to world. But the foreground never stands out, and when you’re zooming past enemies and obstacles, it’s hard to keep up with the action because of all the blurriness. The developers were aware of this issue because, in the settings, the background can be blurred. I appreciate the offer, but this should’ve been on, and it seems like a strange choice considering the simpler option would’ve been to just zoom the camera in farther and blur the background. I’m not saying any of this ruined the game for me, but I had to play Panic Porcupine exclusively in handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch, and that wasn’t ideal. It’s just another case of a mishandled PC port, I guess.

At least the music is good, though it’s a little repetitive — especially after extended play sessions, but it makes each stage cheerful and fun. The bosses are all pushovers — but that didn’t matter too much because, in my opinion, platforming should always be the focus in a game like Panic Porcupine. You can restart a level as many times as you want, but Panic can only take one hit before you’re sent back to the beginning. There is an option to retain all the collectables found in a level when you die instead of losing them all. I decided to go for that because I’d much rather spend my time playing the game than constantly restarting from the beginning and losing all my stuff. This is to say, that Panic Porcupine has a good difficulty curve and remains accessible all the way through. That’s really great to see! I wish more developers would adopt this mindset. If it wasn’t for the zoomed camera, mostly repetitive music and visuals — we could’ve had something truly great on our hands.

Instead, the camera made each level feel like it was working against you, and the repetitive visual style didn’t help much, either. However, if you blur out the background, focus on the controls, and consider the asking price — Panic Porcupine is an ok 2D platformer.