Spoiler Alert Review

Do you ever play a game and just say to yourself: “Why?” Well, I hadn’t in a while until I played Spoiler Alert. From the publishing company that brought us No Time to Explain, an enjoyable and tricky platform puzzler,I thought we would be in for a fun ride when I read the idea for Spoiler Alert. Sadly, this wasn’t to be the case.

Picture this, a platforming game where the rules are turned on their head. Everything is backwards: you don’t save the princess, you unsave her,you don’t kill enemies, you unkill them and you don’t complete a game, you uncomplete it. Failing to undo everything you have done leads to a time paradox and you have to (un)start the level again. Sounds bizarre right? Sounds like something you’d want to try? Well I'm sure that’s what the creators of Spoiler Alert, MEGAFUZZ, thought when they came up with the idea.

In Spoiler Alert, you begin by viewing a portion of the game you are yet to endure, by watching the protagonist, ‘Chilli Pepper Knight’ (CPK for short) complete the game. In the most uninspired of videogame clichés, he ‘rescues’ the princess and the credits begin to roll. However, the credits then unroll, and the game switches into reverse. You unsave the princess, unkill the final boss and then begin to work your way through the levels the game has previously completed in your absence.

So, some essence of plot would be nice. There is literally no reason as to why the game is the way it is. Maybe if ‘CPK’ had fallen into a wormhole after capturing the princess then that might shed light on the situation. Heck, that’s a terrible idea and is exactly why I’m not a videogame developer but at least it’s something to make the player grasp some sort of reason as to why this game in particular is different from the rest.

One of the first things I noticed about this game is how incredibly dull and drab the aesthetics are. The hand-drawn characters and scenery, which could have been made in a day, mixed with the bland block colours make this game an eye-sore. ‘CPK’ has a mere six different animation frames at best, and all the other enemies have even less. It adds to the sheer boredom you will experience playing this game; at least if a game looks good it draws you in and makes you want to play it a little longer. The other thing that has the potential to draw you in is the music which is short, out of place and repetitive - always a plus. 0/2 so far, we’re on a roll.

There are literally two buttons you will need to play this game. 1. The jump button, 2. The action button. This really made me wonder as to why this game has even been released on PC. It’s not graphically hungry, it only takes up 27MB of hard-drive space and you have no advantage to gain by playing it with a mouse and keyboard. Why? Because you only use two buttons! The menus make it look like a direct port from a mobile platform but looking on the respective application stores, I couldn’t find a sniff of this game, despite it being mentioned on the game’s website that it’s available on both iOS and Android (with no specific launch date for either).

I digress - CPK moves backwards through the game, unkilling enemies by jumping on their dead corpses, uncollecting coins by jumping or walking into their faded outlines, and avoiding doing all of that on some occasions. As well as that, you have power-ups where you have to inhale the fireballs you spat or catch the hammers you threw by pressing the action button. If you kill an enemy that wasn’t dead before, collect a coin that wasn’t faded out or fail to inhale a fireball/catch a hammer, then you have a time paradox popping you back to the start of that level portion. Don’t worry about getting too far in the game though because after every single screen you have to click continue to advance. It’s ludicrous! It truly disturbs the flow of the game, especially as these portions of the level can take just a couple seconds to complete.

Good games usually progress in difficulty, starting off easy and then getting harder by the end in what is known as the difficulty curve. Well, being backwards you would think the game starts off hard, then gets easier. Bah, of course not! It’s just monotonously easy throughout! I genuinely hope this game was designed for a younger audience because they certainly aren’t attracting the simplistic and challenging puzzler fanbase akin to Super Meat Boy. It’s just three easy levels, split into 30 easy ‘screens,’ each level with a boss at the beginning. The first boss you encounter you don’t even need to (un)attack as it’s done for you. The second just requires you to jump at the right time and the third seems to be buggy as it doesn’t make a lot of sense what you actually have to do.

If you needed another reason not to buy this game, then here’s another: the game literally takes an hour to 100%; Steam achievements and all. There is a Speedrun mode which removes the ‘continue’ box after every completed screen, but that’s something that should have been done in the first place. The only other addition is the level creator which is simple enough to create only basic levels, as the game’s move-in-one-direction gameplay narrows the possibilities of anything too advanced.

The game’s entire gimmick comes under scrutiny due to inconsistencies as well. For example, if playing backwards like the game would suggest, then surely disappearing platforms would appear once you jump on them, not disappear. Maybe leaps of faith were considered too difficult to comprehend or maybe someone forgot got lost in the confusion of it all. Furthermore, if played as a traditional game from start to finish,  the level design wouldn’t make any sense. Coins right at the start of the screen as well as enemies and varying platform heights remove the illusion of ‘a game but in reverse’ all but completely.

The concept of backwards play is a very promising idea with a lot of scope for development but it seems it would have been better suited out of MEGAFUZZ’s hands as Spoiler Alert would suggest. All in all, there is nothing that warrants this game to even be on PC. The game is dull, boring and frankly an embarrassing addition to the Steam marketplace. With next to no plot, poor excuses for music and level design, no challenge to even the most novice of gamers and a price tag that doesn’t bare any resemblance to the quality or length of the game at £4.99, it seems out of place and should be put immediately out of mind.