40 Winks

You know, let me tell you something. I went into this game with very average expectations and those expectations were met. Not exceeded, and not undershot. 40 Winks is fun to play through in the fall or around Halloween. It has a lot of shortcomings but I still enjoyed my time with the game overall.

I feel like writing 40 Winks off as a generic 3D platformer isn't fair due to the level structure. You have a hybrid between a Banjo-Kazooie style collectathon and a more straight forward Crash-Bandicoot system. Rather than needing collectables to open levels you need them to progress through each level. Each stage has a bunch of gears and doors that are blocked off and only unlocked when you have enough gears. It's an interesting twist on the genre and I appreciate the change of pace. The downside is that, rather than taking the best of both worlds, you get the worst. I'm being a bit harsh with that statement but it's true. You more or less need to collect everything in a level. Each level has 4 keys needed to fight the boss at the end of each world and a certain number of the titular 40 Winks of which you need the entire set in order to win. On top of that the number of gears needed to open each door is pretty strict. It's not like in DK64 where you can get by with half of the colored bananas. You usually need to collect every gear in an area to progress, and even if you do get some leeway, you can usually only miss one or two. If you miss a Wink or Key, the linear levels come into play in a bad way. If you miss a collectable in a game with more open levels you can bee-line straight to what you've missed. But since 40 Winks has linear levels you can't really do that - you basically have to replay the entire level if you miss something crucial.

There's another problem with the level design, too - and that's the use of enemies. Most of the platforming is fine but the game will sometimes throw a ton of enemies at you and not allow you to progress until you beat them. This sometimes happens mutliple times per level. Your character has a wimpy attack that's slow and has poor range. You have this little combo but it leaves you vulnerable at the end of the attack cycle. It's not the worst combat in the world inherently but it faces off against another problem - while each enemy's attacks are easy to avoid, they compensate by having stupidly high amounts of HP. I didn't notice this in the early levels but it was really annoying by the end so I'm assuming that it scales up throughout the game. This doesn't serve to make the game challenging or engaging but it does take up a lot of time. I spent more time than I'd care for using an attack that wasn't very fun.

Speaking of combat, it's worth mentioning the bosses. This game has a boss after every world, which is more than a lot of other 3D platformers had at the time. The downside to that is that every boss fight is mediocre. The bosses don't really have stages or anything, they pretty much just do the same thing until they die and their health tends to be really inflated. It's kind of tedious, but not challenging. Still, I guess it's nice to have them.

Another interesting aspect of this game is the way it handles lives. There is no continue system - if you run out of lives, you go back to where you last saved. Your health also only regenerates when you collect Z's in each level, which work kind of like rings in Sonic a little bit. You lose some when you get hit but can recover some by picking them up. You may be forced to grind for health or lives. The game lets you play these racing minigames to earn one-ups and Z'z but there's no fixed prize for winning the race. You have to beat one opponent and collect items along the way. You get to keep what you've collected, but only if you win. None of these details are bad on their own but they all combine to create something fairly convoluted. If you get stuck at a hard level you have to play the racing game like five times to get two extra lives to stand a fighting chance. It's annoying, but not game breaking. Just a serious of odd design choices that I feel the developers didn't have enough time to fully think through.

One thing this game lacks is replay value. Since you basically need to 100% the game to win you can't exactly replay it to try for a higher completion percentage like in other games. You don't unlock anything after beating the game, either - just an end cutscene. There's no unlockables of any kind, actually - your character never even gains new abilities. The intrinsic reward of beating each level is all you're offered with 40 Winks.

This game is carried by it's theme and presentation. The idea of going through different dream-lands is fun and I liked seeing all the different settings. It is reminiscent of Gex Gecko's TV-channel idea, but there's enough of a unique spin to make 40 Winks charming in it's own right. There's a lot of googly-eyed creatures akin to Banjo Kazooie and a general asthetic you wouldn't find out of place in a rareware game, but I still feel like there's a lot of charm. It feels appropriate to play around Halloween even if it's not a scary game - it's a game fit for early October and Autumn weather.

40 Winks controls fine, and it has a good enough camera. At the end of the day the question is if you find the setting and world charming enough to dive into. There's a lot of interesting game design decisions that don't do this game any favors but, if you can look past that, 40 Winks is a fun world to spend some time in.

super adorable (dare I say charming?) platformer unfortunately held back by rough level design and a constant need to be as thorough as possible. if it wasn't as easy to get lost and was a bit more lenient with how much you needed to collect, this would be a sleeper hit for sure