Adventures of The Carrot Captain

Not everything that shines is gold and not everything with 100% positive reviews is playable. Meet Captain Carrot, not the hero we want but the one we have. He jumps around, can only jump in mid air upon falling or after landing on enemies so long as he attacks them first from above. Even so if they dare to move upwards they can still hurt him and most obstacles in every level. Basically, the player controls a finicky cartoon hero made to piss them off and entertain the audience through “hilarious” banter and quirky dialogue. There’s also currency to buy items and powerups which don’t shake the formula by much, different worlds to traverse and certain side challenges to attempt. All of this provided the game works, and… Holy crap, this might be the most broken 2D platformer I’ve played and that’s saying something upon looking at my library. Nothing here works properly, nothing, not even the bug report option since the site is shut down. In the menus the player will find themselves even struggling to move up and down, in the overworld to just move or interact with the environment and in the levels themselves it’s so much worse. Sometimes a hit will land and others it will not. Sometimes the game will decide you can’t finish a level for no reason because you’ll get stuck in a platform or in mid air or a boss can’t be hit. Maybe you’ll find yourself winning a battle because it decided to kill itself for comedic effect. Even unlocked areas may become locked once again here and there since the save slot goes between automatic and manual randomly. It’s a complete disaster. However even outside of that, what baffled me the most was the key mapping. Let’s say you can accept that the upper button (Y) in the joystick can be used for accepting and while some options appear horizontally in certain menus the left and right keys do nothing. Strange but passable. Then some bosses have cutscenes super slow whose dialogue you skip with that button, then there’s a pause and you press the left button (X) so that then it may start. Annoying, but sure. Finally suppose you want to pause to get a drink and since your joystick ran out of batteries you press Enter. Nothing. Escape. Nothing. Hmmm, maybe V? Nothing. Press press press… oh it paused. Wait, what did I-WHAT?! YOU PAUSE THE GAME IN THE KEYBOARD WITH ‘ñ’?! And that’s on my keyboard since in the international one it’s the ‘`’ key. Is the developer a vim user or something? This control scheme doesn’t make any sense. To be somewhat fair to the deve, if I were to point out something positive about the game it would be the sprite work, the general presentation and… that’s about it. The whole playthrough was so incredibly irritating that even trying I couldn’t focus on a single line of dialogue nor enjoy the soundtrack. By the end it wouldn’t even let me go back to complete what I had missed since the bit of information that should have told me that bugged out. Sadly appropriate finale for a game in dire need of a patch or being delisted. Don’t play this.