Eyri’s Action Review (PC)

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ricedigital
November 23, 2012
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Never judge a game by its title screen, as the saying (that we totally just made up) goes. This looks sweet right? Looks all cute in a ‘it’s-probably-a-bit-like-Mario’ kind of way right? WRONG! Eyri’s Action is no run-of-the-mill platformer – It’s oh so very VERY hard – almost vindictively so. To give you a rough idea of how hard – we died 81 times before we finished the first level, but we still carried on playing.

There’s a good reason for that – for all its difficulty, Eryi’s Action is clever, addictive, full of knowing humour- and crucially, fun.

At its heart Eyri’s Action is a platformer. There’s not a gamer alive who hasn’t played plenty of these in their time – and Eryi’s Action knows this. It knows what you think is ‘normal’ or ‘correct’ for the genre – and then it takes advantage of those assumptions to kill you. Innocuous scenery turns into a deadly trap. Easy jumps are scuppered where you least expect them. A simple walk from point A to point B (as the game’s opening so amusingly demonstrates) turns to instant death.

So what starts as happy and cute, turns into something very mean spirited, but most importantly has the amusing, compulsive backbone of a VERY smart action puzzle game. You discover the unfairness, the mean traps and silly dangers – and then it’s up to you to figure out how to overcome them – through a combination of traditional platforming skill and problem-solving ingenuity.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Eryi’s Action would be intensely annoying – but you’d be wrong again. For all its difficulty, Eryi’s Action is very rarely frustrating – thanks to good check-pointing (which means you never have too much to repay when you fail) and mercifully, a complete absence of any ‘lives’. It also helps that you just know that the game is trolling you on purpose – these aren’t unfair deaths through bad game design. The difficulty spikes are intentional – challenges, hurdles, puzzles that you’ll be compelled to best.

You die, you try again, you die, you try again – and with each little success comes with it a glowing sense of achievement (not to mention relief) that we’ve not experienced in a platformer for a good while.
VERDICT
A great little platformer that goes out if it’s way to surprise. It’s an old school challenge – and one full of humour. Some games make you laugh though their dialogue and script, or though their ridiculous scenarios – Eryi’s Action makes you laugh through pure game design, which is an achievement in itself. For that reason, is one of the most memorable platformers of recent times.

Eryi’s Action is available to buy from our store here!