Stamp Boy is a game that I saw around the time of its release, and I thought it looked pretty cute, so I wishlisted it to keep an eye on it. a few weeks ago, I bought it on sale--and I do think that this game isn't necessarily bad for its price as I don't think this is one of the worst games evar or whatever. but you know what it is? infuriating and dreadfully designed--especially coming from any game which sets a watermark for the precision platformer genre (e.g., RITE, Dojoran, Celeste). as of now, my experience has been very love/hate with Stamp Boy, and I would rather give this a sideways thumb than a thumbs down, but the bewildering design mistakes and absurd bugs lead me to err on the side of tentatively not recommending. read on though and see if you may tolerate my bugbears more.
+ lovely pixel art. if you're someone who can put up with terrible level design to see some delightful pixel art, you may not mind Stamp Boy so much. similarly adorable are the character designs. visually, I think this game looks pretty fantastic.
- while the character design suits the game's carefree tone, there's a pretty bad visual communication for one of the turtles which start appearing on 3-1. basically, these are enemies you can't "stamp" on, and this is communicated through a spike on the top of their shells. problem: notice how I said spike singular. additionally, this spike isn't big enough that you can't jump over it, or have plenty of room to jump on either side of the shell where this spike isn't at. so this is a failure of communicating to the player that you cannot stamp on this enemy type as you would the basic goomba-style mob.
+ great music, I'd definitely pick up the soundtrack. satisfying sound effects too.
+ controls are pretty tight.
~ performance isn't perfect on a potato machine like the laptop I'm currently using (which is surprising, seeing as it's able to run much more demanding games such as Book of Demons really well). haven't been able to set up my new behemoth PC yet, but I'd imagine it'd run blissfully on there. will update this once I test that out in a few weeks or so.
+ the writing is damn charming and lightly humorous. made me grin, didn't make me laugh, but that's alright--not all jokes need to be gutbusters, and sometimes you can appreciate something simplistic.
- first level in, and I already run into a bug where I have to kill myself or hit the restart button. basically, the game uses these jump pads a lot. jump pads are great fun in platformers, problem: this jump pad is placed as such that if you jump towards the right side of it, you will actually clip through the floor above you, and get stuck in that floor. this happened to me *several times*, and you're just dead at this point. restart or walk into the floor spikes next to you.
- the level design in this is, as I mentioned in the outset, genuinely terrible. compound this with the bad decision to zoom the perspective in this close to the character when using this school of game design, lack of visual clarity in how far a jump will get you, a timer, a potpourri approach to tossing hazards at you senselessly, and very shoddy teaching of concepts--and you have a frequently frustrating experience. contrast this with one of the best games of 2020, RITE by Pond Games, in which the background is a grid of tiles so that you know right away "my jump gets me about x tiles away", there's no timer and you're never placed into immediate danger (so you can parse out how things work and plan ahead, instead of having to trial & error your way to an unsatisfying cut to the next level), and you can see pretty much the whole level on one screen every time so you don't feel cheated when something seemingly comes out of nowhere. Stamp Boy fumbles the ball with every single one of these lessons RITE taught (obviously RITE came out afterwards, but there were better precision platformers than Stamp Boy before it released), and fails to provide any alternative solutions for the grating nature that so often plagues precision platformers like it.
- for some reason, when I left the game partway through world 2, it decided to unlock world 3 for me when I re-opened it a lil while later. "how generous", you may think, unaware that I couldn't find the level I was on so that I could play the levels in order, so I tried hopping over to world 3, where I am now stuck and dunno how to get back to world 2. it's a shame, I wanted to see if its boss fight fared better than the pretty eh one that topped off the first world.
in all honesty, the game's cheap as chips so if you really want to try it out after all that, you may enjoy it more than I did. if this is a debut game from this developer, I do think it shows a lot of potential, and I think if they learn from Stamp Boy, they could turn out something far better down the road.
