A Petite Platformer That Packs A Surprising Punch
I have to be honest: I wasn’t expecting too much from Pogui. It ticked every box on the ‘generic indie platformer’ checklist: pixel art, an animal protagonist, basic controls, even a set of levels set in a candy land. I assumed I would be playing Pogui and forgetting it in roughly the same timeframe.
What a pleasure it is to be proven wrong. Like the pug main character, it’s a small package that’s bursting with energy and character. It’s not the most inventive of platformers, but it’s purely entertaining.
Puggy Precision
Pogui the pug doesn’t have a complicated set of moves. She can jump, run, drop down from platforms, and duck. She’s hardly Prince of Persia. But Pogui squeezes every drop from that move set. Other games might have sidelined the drop-down move and the duck, for example, but Pogui puts a surprising amount of emphasis on them within its level design. Large chunks of the game require you to master the art of ducking beneath moving platforms. By focusing on things other games don’t, Pogui becomes a 2D platformer that is a single deviation from the norm.
Pogui also benefits from controls – with one small exception – that are absolutely spot on. Pogui is a joy on the sticks, with a nice arcing jump and generosity in terms of collision detection. I felt like I was in control, and that allowed Pogui to ratchet the difficulty up a little. It’s confident in its own ability, so challenges the player slightly more than the average budget platformer.
The one small exception to the breezy controls is the run-and-jump, which applies a skid after a landing. When you’re aiming for small platforms, that skid can be unfortunate and a touch unpredictable. On the last of Pogui’s worlds, where time is of the essence (we won’t spoil why), it amounted to a minor nuisance. We avoided using the run and jump if we could get away with it.
Plundering Past Platformers
It feels strange lauding Pogui because it’s a platformer that doesn’t do much different from other indie platformers. The enemies aren’t anything special: every last one of them has a corollary in a Mario game. In fact, in the underwater levels, the squids and pufferfish were so similar that we wondered whether Nintendo lawyers might suddenly appear from behind the sofa. Enemies moved from side to side, rose and fell out of boxes like piranha plants, and crawled around floating crates.
Hazards are similarly similar. Platforms move on prescribed routes, spikes rise and fall, and Thwomp-like blocks fall down, threatening to crush. There are a few surprises, particularly when it comes to lasers and that last surprise world, but mostly this is achingly familiar.
In Pogui, you’re not even doing anything special. The levels are slightly longer than your usual indie fodder, but they’re an entrance and an exit (adorably, Pogui just wants to reach his bed, which updates to a hammock on some beach levels) with bone collectibles on the way. There are no hidden worlds, no branching paths. This is reasonably straightforward.
The more I write, the more I wonder why I liked Pogui. Because it seems so retrograde. It doesn’t push against the formula in a meaningful way. The answer, I think, is that doing things well – with sharpness, precision and an adorable pug – is a perfectly viable path to success. Not every game needs to be innovative, and Pogui isn’t searching for new ways to do something.
There’s A Place In Our Heart For Pogui
I think I like Pogui because it generates a sense of flow while also making me feel like I’m a platforming king (which I’m not). It combines pinpoint controls with platforming sequences that seem harder than they are. Having survived the traps it threw at me, I felt a greater sense of reward than I tend to get from indie platformers.
I’d recommend playing Pogui on the Normal difficulty setting. It puts a limit on the lives that you receive, while the collectible bones in each level hand you one extra life. I found that Pogui’s level of challenge was pitched to the point that I was always around 4 or 5 lives, which added a neat sense of tension. With infinite lives, the bone collectibles wouldn’t have felt so vital.
Straight-Up Fun
I’m not going to pretend that Pogui is revolutionary. It’s incredibly straightforward as indie platformers go. But it just feels like, across the board, everything has been lifted a tier. The levels are that little bit better than average in terms of design and challenge. The controls have a neat snap and flow. The presentation is puggy.
Pogui isn’t interesting. It’s easy to sneer at it, wondering what it’s bringing to the 2D platform conversation. But those people would be ignoring how fun it is. Using the components of every other platformer ever, it manages to whip up an hour’s worth of platforming that had us smiling as we were carried along by its momentum.
Important Links
Pogui Bounds Onto Xbox, PlayStation, Switch And PC In A Pixel-Perfect Pup Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pogui-bounds-onto-xbox-playstation-switch-and-pc-in-a-pixel-perfect-pup-adventure/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pogui/9nq4mppngj6n
