Mibibli's Quest

Mibibli is pink! what more can i say! If you think games are art ♥♥♥♥ you! Megaman if it hated you

I found Mibibli's Quest after about half an hour of scrolling through steam's on sale $7 CDN and under listings in search of hidden gems. Stumbling on this game was a blessing and a curse because on one hand I feel vindicated, but on the other hand I'm gonna be chasing the high of finding this game forever. Retro NES style platformers are pretty well worn territory at this point, but Mibibli stands out for its mechanical inventiveness and bizarre tone. Like any good platformer there's a lot of really strong level gimmicks that range from high concept stuff like DDR arrow projectiles you need to dance along with to evade, to simple things like a unique enemy or hazard. What really sells the game though is its structure. I don't want to give away the specifics, but it kind of keeps upping the ante. It's the kind of game where by the time you reach the actual ending it feels like it could've ended 3 times already, and with each time it could've ended it adds a new dimension to the game. All this to say it's just a really solid platformer. It's very challenging, but also very learnable, and knows how to throw you a bone here and there. But I think the aesthetics of the game are what make it really truly memorable. The most succinct way I can put it is this game looks like a copy of Action 52 attained sentience and desperately wanted to tell the world a fundamental truth of existence, but it can only communicate through the assets it was given. And I think the Action 52 comparison is apt, a lot of the sprites in this game are stylistically dissonant and bizarre in the same way. It's so unique and memorable the whole way through. The one caveat I'll give is that in the late game the controls gets a little iffy. It commits itself a little too much to a NES-esque control scheme, and as it introduces new mechanics they require some odd and unintuitive inputs. I'd recommend making use of Steam's input binding. If you want to play with a controller you'll have to do that anyways, there's no native controller support. But in summation this is a wonderful, bizarre, deeply enjoyable game, and especially for how dirt cheap it is I'd highly recommend picking it up. But for the record, if you want to find hidden gems on steam it's easier to use Steamdb to search by review count.