Growing Pains is a small indie platformer game by Smudged Cat Games with unique game mechanics that is already available on Xbox 360 through the indie channel and is soon to be released on Steam.
In the game you play a small orange creature called the ‘Vessel’ that resembles nothing more than a living ball of orange spiky fur with an eye. The little thing’s very active though, able to jump twice its height (or more if you time the jump upon landing correctly), ‘run’ along the ground at a decent speed and even wall jump which is how you find yourself moving on through the levels most of the time. Oh, and as time ticks by the Vessel is ever so slowly growing, causing levels to become a race against time to complete your task before you get too large to move onto the next section of the level.
The game contains 9 levels, each with 3 difficulty levels. The aim of the levels is the same each time: make your way through the levels without getting stuck or killed by one of the traps as fast as possible, collecting the rainbow-coloured ‘glowsticks’ to open up the ‘gates’ blocking your path at the end of each small room of the level. As noted above, you can run, jump, cling against walls to slow your descent, wall-jump up the wall you’re clinging to and get a higher leap upon landing (although you need to time it just right) to make your way around the rooms and avoid the traps. You can also temporarily stop your growth by holding down a key (default is the ‘o’ key) using up a power gauge shown at the top of the screen or accelerate your growth to allow you to be able to make the height you need to jump (default is the ‘p’ key).
Playing the game I must admit it has elements I like. The concept of completing a task before you grow too large is a good one, and the controls are responsive and smooth. Provided you time it all right it’s possible to leap between two walls close together to climb up a tall vertical part of the map like some sort of limbless athlete, laughing at the spiked ball obstacles in your way. The sounds too are wonderful and the music charming. The game lacks a multiplayer but it does contain scoreboards (one for each difficulty per level, making a grand total of 27 over all) which you can try to get onto the top of and giving the player an excuse to keep trying levels to perfect their jumps and glowstick collection techniques.
However, there are some things that threw me off about the game. One of them is the visuals, with the Vessel being very nicely detailed but other elements such as the glowsticks and the spiked balls being much less so which caused a bit of a weird disconnect for me I’m afraid. This game is also by its nature very hard to get right without a lot of practice and after a handful of failed attempts it did feel a bit hard to want to keep going and complete the level, never mind aim for the leaderboards. The default positioning of the ‘stop growing’ and ‘grow more’ keys also made me feel a bit irritated as the ‘move’ keys are set to ‘a’ and ‘d’ and jump is space, and this sets the growing commands on the opposite side of the keyboard to the other controls which is a bit of a pain when you need to keep them held down while you’re moving about. Fortunately like most games, the controls are rebindable so you can move them if you wish and so this downside is only a niggle at best because of it.
Overall as a game Growing Pains is a decent game, if not quite the best I’ve ever played. The music is good, the visuals are alright and the concept simple but well-executed. I will say this though. If not already available Smudged Cat needs to make and sell plushie versions of the Vessel. I’d buy one, with black button eyes. 😀
Growing Pains is released on Steam tomorrow, May 28th.
