We’d love to know what the creators of Garlic are on, because it’s certainly not garlic. Something stronger has been sprinkled on their steak, as this game is one of the weirdest and most imaginative indie platformers that we’ve played in recent memory.
Garlic is an onion-headed boy who gets his head turned by the Cyber Goddess, a leggy deity who climbs the Sacred Tower and challenges him to join her. He’ll get whatever he wishes once he gets there, so he promptly starts climbing. It’s a plot that can stray into ickiness in a Dead or Alive Volleyball way (do we really need to spy on Cyber Goddess’s changing room?), but if you can ignore the occasional seediness, then the plot has some charm to it. Garlic knows that its main character is an over-eager doofus, and leans into it.
That’s not to say that Garlic is hopeless. He’s actually got some moves. There’s a dash, a wall-jump and a ground-pound, which are all staples of action-platformers like this, but there’s a real flow and dynamism to them. You can transition from one to the other with a touch of a button, and there’s no delay. Garlic just feels good at a deeply intuitive and visceral level. We found ourselves in a state of flow, surging around levels, from wall-climb to dash to ground stomping an enemy. It’s one of those games that makes you look incredibly good, even though the truth is likely different.
The sheer control and mastery over the space means that Garlic can make things pretty darn challenging. You can be required to sequence your moves together in succession if you want to get through, as platforms lower into lava, spikes appear from the roof, and enemies act as momentary, ground-poundable platforms. You can appear in a level, wondering how the hell you’re going to get through it, only to find that you managed it rather easily after all.
Reinforcing that balance between difficulty and ability is the checkpoint system. As someone who is utterly rubbish at this kind of game – Meat Boy brings me out in hives, N++ causes me to spontaneously combust – the checkpointing here is just sublime. Not only is progress saved on entry to the level, but Sonic-like flags save your progress too. Close down the game and you will be back to the flag you last reached. Most of all, it breaks the game down into achievable chunks. If something is punishingly hard, you can be sure that there will be a flag immediately after it. All you have to do is get there.
There are no lives, no continues, no punishments for completing a level in tiny, clove-sized chunks. There is a health system in play, which we’re less enamoured with, though. Once you get hurt, you enter into a kind of panicked frenzy, which you can barely control. You point Garlic in a direction and hope he doesn’t do himself a mischief. But it’s too random: you have so little control in this state that it’s basically a toss of a coin as to whether you survive. We’d have rathered something more guaranteed, whether it was more punishing or less so.
And Garlic isn’t so hot when a lot of things are happening at once. Hitting an enemy on the head sends you bouncing away erratically, and being damaged makes you dangerously erratic, so a sequence with a lot of enemies at once (an underwater sewer section with dolphin-like creatures gives us nightmares) can mean that you’re pinballed about without a notion of what’s going on. Garlic is great, but it can feel like the pad has been taken out of your hands on occasion.
But boy is it worth it, because Garlic is so determined to keep changing things up. We played it at the same time as ChronoBreach Ultra, another action-platformer from Ratalaika Games, and the difference between the two in terms of variety and memorable moments was like night and day. In any given moment in Garlic, you will be running away from giant aadvarks, flying in a shoot ’em up aboard a squid, or avoiding a giant bouncing head.
And that’s just the levels. Garlic loves an intermission, and often chucks out Wario-Ware-like minigames to see how you fare. We’ve tossed litter into bins, walked moodily down a street kicking cans, and completed into-the-camera platforming sections that feel like an isometric Crash Bandicoot. As you’d probably expect, they’re a mixed old bag – some of them are great fun, others are waking nightmares – but the fact that they’re there when they didn’t need to be, makes them all the more endearing. They are brain-farts of the designers, and the randomness gives Garlic its own charm.
Garlic marinates in that charm. The art may look 8-bit, but the animations and character designs are very much modern. The overblown reactions of Garlic are hilarious, cribbing from Japanese animations like One Piece, gurning in an over-the-top fashion as the Cyber Goddess flirts with you, or you get hit by that flipping aardvark. It just looks and feels polished, buffed to a glorious sheen, and that cleanness allows the random moments to really sing.
We’d love to meet the people behind Garlic. We imagine they’re mad as a hatter and great fun to be around, because that’s precisely how we’d describe Garlic. It may not be big, it may not be clever, but it’s plenty weird, and the action-platforming is so polished that you’ll be sprinting through that weirdness with a whacking great smile on your face.
If you ever feel like gaming is becoming a generic blob then play Garlic. You’ll thank us later.
