Pepper Grinder is by no means a bad game. The art, animations, and music are top notch and its drilling mechanic is polished and responsive. It’s just everything outside of that core package that I feel like really misses the mark.

If you played the demo, all of the levels play out mostly as you would expect them to: drill through terrain, be on the look out for hidden areas with golden coins, and kill a couple of enemies along the way. There are cannons and grappling points sprinkled throughout that help add some variety to levels and a handful of really interesting, if not a bit underutilized, terrain additions that were a lot of fun to play around with. I especially liked the blimps that you had to traverse around without popping them with your drill, the elastic purple goo that you could only get out of if you hit a drillable surface, and the destructible boats you drill right through the center of to sink. I wish there a couple of more stand out examples to point to overall, but what’s there is pretty solid.

I really wasn’t a huge fan of the sections that deviated too much from the main formula; namely the gatling gun, rocket launcher, and giant mech areas. They were extremely straightforward and it was time spent that I wasn’t using my drill to traverse areas. The majority of the frustrations a ran into during my playthrough were centered around enemy placement and combat encounters. Nothing super egregious, just sections that usually killed my flow.

The bosses were my least favorite segments by far. It basically throws out the most fun part of the game and replaces it with encounters that focus primarily on combat in cramped spaces. When I got to the Magmaworm, I was convinced that there was something that I was missing. Some sort of hidden mechanic or strategy that I just wasn’t seeing. But it just boiled down simply waiting for the chance to hit while the boss did the same basic movements over and over again. The rest of the bosses aren’t much better, with the final boss being way more frustrating than fun for a lot of the same reasons.

I know that auto-scroller boss fights are considered cop-outs in a lot of way since you’re basically just doing what you would in a normal stage with a big goon pressuring you from the back, but I would have much preferred a few of those instead of these clunky combat encounters.

The in-game store seemed promising at first, but I found it really lacking in a lot of ways. The only thing that was really worth investing in were the keys that opened up the hidden stages. There are also some costumes you can purchase with coins, which I didn’t really care about since I liked the default look just fine. The rest of the selection includes temporary health (which is pretty useless since you lose it as soon as you get hit once in a level and it doesn’t come back if you restart at a checkpoint), stickers, and a variety of sticker books. Personally speaking, there’s nothing less inciting than collecting stickers and decorating sticker books in games. I just don’t get the appeal. And with these as the only options you have to spend your treasure on, there’s really no incentive to go out of your way to pick more than you’ll automatically get while traversing the critical path of any given level.

The narrative is as bare bones as it gets. While that really doesn’t matter in a game like this, I just wish there was a little bit more here than what was delivered. Especially since they pull a foes-turned-friends twist in the final moments that might have hit a little harder if there was a bit more set up.

The game also isn’t very long. With all of the main areas, hidden areas, and going for most of the coins while not be obsessive about getting every single one, I clocked out at about 2.6 hours. This would be fine if there was more to do after the credits roll, but time trials really don’t do it for me and once I had enough gold coins to unlock all of the hidden stages, I really didn’t have any drive to go back and scour levels to find the ones that I had missed.

I guess at the end of the day, with how refined the movement is, I was expecting/wanting more of a Celeste experience. Much less combat focused and more of an emphasis on stages and mechanics that evolved in interesting ways as you progressed through the game. While there were definitely glimpses of that throughout, there were a lot of distracting elements that kept this game from really reaching its full potential. I’m looking forward to what Ahr Ech puts out next. Even though I feel like this may have been a swing and a miss, the bones of this game are really good and I’m confident that they can knock it out of the park with another go.

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