When a person first sees Spinch, one can’t help but fall in love with the psychedelic colors, cute creatures, and addicting music. Even in the trailer, players can get a lot of joy and entertainment from this game’s overall atmosphere. What I didn’t expect was an extremely challenging and rewarding platformer game along with those fantastic colors.
Let’s talk about these looks. Spinch is a pixely environment with just as many colors as the Yellow Submarine movie. It is almost a little jarring and hard to watch because it’s so crazy colorful. But this is a good thing, the environments are always moving, entertaining, and the enemies/evil-doers in the game or vibrant chaotic splashes cyclones of color.
The gameplay is super tight: running, jumping, holding onto walls, and dashing. These all make this platformer extremely simple in nature, but very difficult to master and progress. I never found the levels too punishing, I felt that I kept learning every time I made an attempt and I would eventually make it to the end. I would have liked slightly more consistent and frequent checkpoints, it becomes really disheartening and almost frustrating when getting close to the next checkpoint and then having to go very, very far back after death. I was also surprised by the boss fights. Depending on the number of little bonus people found and bonus rounds completed, players will have more ammo and opportunity to deal damage to the boss. It’s another simple and yet excellent concept that encourages players to beat the levels while finding all the little secrets.
The only issue with the game that makes it tough to recommend at the moment is the terrible frame rate drops and somewhat long loading times. With my Switch docked or in hand, I found there to be some serious frame rate drops one in a while which sometimes resulted in my character dying. It isn’t a game-breaker, and levels are still totally beatable. But it just happened too often and really needs an update soon. I’m unsure how the PC version is faring, but I’m sure that it is more steady and consistent than the Nintendo Switch version.
Even with the performance issues, I think this is a really great game to play. For fans of side-scrolling games, crazy style, and intense gameplay, this game is for you! We can just hope that there will be an update soon to fix some performance issues on the Switch and get it running as smooth as butter.
