Public Service Announcement for anyone playing this game: get a Pro-Controller. Trust me, your thumbs will be forever grateful. Awesome Pea is a retro-styled, insta-revive platformer à la Super Meat Boy that stars a greedy little pea tasked with nabbing as much treasure as possible…and survive along the way.
Awesome Pea strives to find a balance between casual fun and a challenging experience. Developer PigeonDev certainly brings that familiar sense of frustration the genre is known for: pixel-precise jumps and being super smart about how you utilize that ever so useful double-jump. But for platforming scrubs like myself, Awesome Pea makes several concessions to make the experience a tad more accessible. The levels are mercifully short, two minutes at most for a successful run through each level… but it WILL feel long as each step further into the level brings a fresh layer of Hell. Death means you instantly revive at the start of the level, so you will learn from your mistakes the hard way. If play as a greedy little pea the way I did, you can try for Perfect Run and nab every shiny gem and coin on the map. If speed is more your thing, you can test your skills against the clock instead for an impressive Speed Run. The in-game clock counts up instead of down, a design decision I applaud because it provides a semblance of urgency without a sense of impending doom. Whatever your approach may be, Awesome Pea is packed with some awesome level design to maximize the fun.
Each level belongs to a limited set of “genres” by the developers. There’s a familiar grassy landscapes, seemingly endless runs on top of trains, descents into mine shafts, and tight dungeon rooms with a lot of verticality. The levels are small enough that you know success is just beyond your grasp, taking just long enough to beat so that your rain almost–but not quite–overheats from the focus. Your fingers will ache, but the pea on screen responds precisely to your button presses… though I haven’t really figured out the rules on when you CAN double-jump after falling (not jumping!) off of a ledge.
The visuals feature a green palette that hearkens back to the LCD screens of the original Nintendo Game Boy. The look and gameplay brought back memories of hunching over that old, unlit screen trying to get a good angle from any light source in the room. There’s also a CRT effect that oddly combines two visual cues for an ‘old school’ look that doesn’t quite work as well together. LCD monitors and CRT sets are very different, which is why the Game Boy didn’t have scan lines. The result is some a lot of overall fuzziness which makes the adorable pixels a bit hard to see. I was very thankful for an option to turn these effects off. Unfortunately, not all minor gripes can be so easily switched off.
One noticeable flaw in Awesome Pea is its music looping. Not the music itself, mind you, the music is a pitch-perfect recreation of that jazzy/gameshow-ish music that sprang from the Game Boy’s single, tiny speaker. But when the track reaches the end of its loop, it will quietly fade up before suddenly blaring back up again from the beginning. It’s a bit distracting, and easily fixed. I mean, if simple games from the 1980’s could have an infinite music loop, there is no excuse why a game of the current year cannot do the same.
Awesome Pea is just as sweet and adorable as it looks and is a fun, affordable platformer. At $5.99 on the Nintendo Switch eShop, Awesome Pea is a foregone conclusion for those with even the most modest of platforming skills. It’s no Super Meat Boy (which I imagine would be cruel and unusual punishment on your thumbs to play in the Switch’s Handheld Mode), but it doesn’t have to be. Awesome Pea stands on its own legs just fine…well, if a pea had legs to stand on, that is.
A review key was provided by PigeonDev for the Nintendo Switch.
