As someone who enjoys traditional, perhaps more simplistic gameplay that mostly belongs to a long-forgotten era, I found the idea of a development team making a brand new title for an existinct yet miraculously popular console intruiging. Playing the demo, the game appears to be something originating out of that bygone era.
The control scheme is simple and intuitive although specific interactions with objects in the level aren’t all that intuitive to learn to begin with and some form of tutorial or control guide would be beneficial to newcomers. Specifically, it wasn’t clear that rolling into holes in the ground would project the character up into a higher part of the level. The mushroom bounce pads were also finicky and were difficult to interact with.
Speaking of bounce pads, it’s clear that the game takes a lot of inspiration from Sonic as a means of traversing the stage, however, there didn’t appear to be much in the demo to interact with. The colour palette also seemed a little subdued when compared with some of the better titles originally released on the system and some additional background detail and aesthetic design across the level would certainly make the game more interesting to travel through.
One niggling issue worth mentioning is the effect of water on the speed and movement of the character. There are various pools of water in the demo stage and should the character come into contact with the water, gameplay slows down to an almost unbearable crawl with jumps nerfed and movement grinding to a halt. Perhaps the character could adopt a swimming pose and move through water more quickly as a means to combat what is arguably the game’s most glaring issue from a mechanical perspective, at least from what is available to play in the demo.
In all, the demo shows off a small cross-section of what the game can offer but as it stands, the demo doesn’t really offer anything in the way of gameplay. I imagine that this level in the finished product will contain enemies, collectibles and more objects to interact with but it stands to reason that without being able to test these features out, the demo area appears sparse and feels uninteresting to play through.
I have high hopes for the finished game and hopefully a future demo will reveal more of what the full game has to offer.