Spewer

Got the Basement collection the other day so I thought it'd make sense to go through and tackle these games one at a time, starting with this neat little puzzle game. When playing this you can immediately see a lot of Edmund's trademark stylistic decisions that go into many of his works. You've got his cartoony visuals, you've got the premise itself being pretty gross and a bit immature, and you've got a game that's built around some pretty interesting core mechanics. The whole angle of making a puzzle platformer that revolves around fluid physics is a pretty cool one that leads to some really cool things but also some major problems. The biggest issue to me is the inherently imprecise nature of these physics and how it makes puzzles pretty difficult to design around.

While there's certainly some clever puzzles that require a nice spot of thinking, there's also a fair share of ones that feel more akin to fighting against clunky controls, where you know what you need to do, but the execution just feels inconsistent and frustrating. There's also this problem I had where the game seems to get progressively laggier every time you die and restart the level, to the point where it feels barely playable due to the precision required of the player at certain points. The powerups feel similarly hit or miss, with some of them, particularly the one that increases your force and the one that lets you move through acid, being cool and adding another dimension to the puzzle solving gameplay, while the others feel very inconsistent to the point where it feels more like the puzzle is simply trying to get these abilities to properly function rather than actually having to think. This makes some later levels in the game infuriating when it almost feels as if it's up to luck on whether or not the player can succeed, which once again further detracts from the gameplay. The mechanics themselves are usually really cool, and I think that there's often some really neat, simplistic level design that shows a deep understanding of the dynamics this brings to the table, but even so, Spewer still feels somewhat flawed so I can't really say I love it even if it's cool and one of the stronger flash games out there.