Pepper Grinder
BORING PLATFORMER
In a good way! The superb drilling of PEPPER GRINDER is sublimely chaotic
By Abbie Stone
Poor Pepper. She’s the star of Devolver Digital’s new platformer, but she would be laughed off the stage at the Annual Platforming Protagonist Awards. Not that she’d have much luck leaving that stage unassisted. Pepper’s hobbled by a pathetic jump, a mediocre little hop that can barely get her a few feet off the ground. So it’s a stroke of good fortune that she’s rammed her arm into a drill attachment that can send her swimming through dirt, then use her momentum to burst out and fly through the air.
Well, maybe less ‘good fortune’, more ‘mixed blessing’ and perhaps even ‘get this damn monkey’s paw off of me’. It turns out that having a drill for an appendage can actually be quite cumbersome. Pepper drills through dirt a little faster than you’d like, demanding quick reflexes to move in something close enough to the direction you wanted to go, or at least a route that ideally doesn’t end in certain death. This is all completely by design, of course, and gradually mastering such a joyously unwieldy method of navigation makes for a terrific little platformer.