Betomis is an extremely hard game to review. That’s not because it’s complex or difficult to convey in words. It’s because it has no remarkable features at all. It doesn’t have a single handhold for us to grab hold of; no nobble or quirk that helps guide our climb through the review.
We’ve had to resort to describing it matter-of-factly. Betomis is a platformer. It’s one of those platformers that comes broken up into levels. There’s thirty here for you to play, with the achievements stopping short at level twenty-five.
Each level has that classic objective of reaching the end. Your little knight needs to reach a door in a far corner of the level, but the door is – more often than not – locked. You need a key, and that is stashed in a different corner of the room. So, you’re hopping from platform to platform in order to match lock with key and move on.
Your wee knight has a double jump to make that easier, and it works fine enough. We found it didn’t trigger on occasion, but it’s rare enough that we put that down to human error. There’s a weird quirk with spike traps, since you can land on them without dying, but if you move afterwards – even away from them – you will suddenly die. Again, this is rare enough to be dismissed as a minor nuisance. Generally, the platforming in Betomis is decent, and allows the designers to create something that sits between casual platforming and precision-platforming.
An unremarkable platformer needs enemies, and Betomis duly obliges. There are three in total: a turtle-thing that moves back and forth, a bat that flies and moves back and forth, and a piranha plant that lunges at you when you get close. They are all bottom-bouncable, making them relatively easy to dispatch.
Betomis, in possibly a single act of being remotely interesting, sticks these enemies in low-roofed places where you can’t bottom-bounce. Pray tell, we hear you ask, how do you kill them? Similar to the key in a level, you can come across a sword. Once it’s collected, you can jab X to attack enemies, killing them without the need of your arse. Just don’t get too enamoured with it: the sword disappears between levels.
The mild interest of having to dodge carnivorous plants so that you can bonk them with a sword is completely and utterly negated by the sword feeling pants. It’s ridiculously stubby, to the point where you have to cuddle the pixels of the enemy that you’re trying to hit. It often leads to unwanted deaths, as you attempt to move into the tiny window where you can hit an enemy without them killing you.
And that, my friends, is about what Betomis has to offer. There are no upgrades for the knight, no collectibles to find. There are no difficulties or different modes. The knight has three enemies to face, and a double-jump plus an unlockable sword-swipe. This is his arsenal to face thirty levels and roughly an hour’s worth of gameplay.
Which is to say that Betomis is extremely simple – unambitious, even. It’s what generative AI would come up with if given the very simple prompt of ‘create a platformer’.
Which, of course, is entirely unfair to its creator. To Betomis’ credit, the levels are designed with care and clearly not AI at all. It uses a tiny range of enemies and level ingredients to create something that is finely balanced. It was in that sweet-spot of killing us three or four times per level, yet offering just enough hope that next time would be different. We never quite felt like quitting, and Betomis was done in a single play-session.
Which is to say that Betomis isn’t bad. Over its hour-long length, we negotiated its difficulty spikes and reached the end with a modicum of satisfaction. But be under no illusion: Betomis is unremarkable. Stick all the indie platformers in the world into a blender, then pour out a tiny espresso cup and you’d have Betomis. It’s playable, forgettable and every bit a three out of five.
