Run up an incline and jump off a side wall. Land on a small trampoline. Whip around a curved ceiling and hug the wall to fall into a small angled safe zone. Jump for some gold gems rather than running straight to the exit and run into a mine. Die.
Run up an incline and jump off a side wall. Land on a small trampoline. Graze a corner rather than the curved ceiling and fall onto a mine. Die.
Run up an incline and jump off a side wall. Land on a small trampoline. Hit an edge rather than the curved ceiling and fall onto a mine. Die.
Run up an incline and jump off a side wall. Land on a mine. Die.
Run up an incline and jump off a side wall. Land on a small trampoline. Whip around a curved ceiling. Fail to fall off the wall precisely enough and hit a mine on the corner. Die.
Congratulations. You've just spent a minute failing at N++. Depending on your reflexes and your ability to intuit the mechanics of some elegant physics-based jumping, you'll probably embark on many more failure-filled minutes before you can open up the door and complete the level.
If just reading that description (or watching the 26 deaths in the above video) makes you want to bang your head against the nearest wall in frustration, N++ probably isn't for you. If you can push through the failures, though, N++ will let you experience some of the most transcendentally satisfying platforming successes in gaming at least a few hundreds times over.
N++ can trace its lineage back over ten years to N, a Flash-based platformer that's still fully playable online. The game was ported to consoles and portables in 2008 as N+, with a few new features and new levels, but the basic design has changed surprisingly little over a decade. This is platforming distilled to its bare essence—two directional buttons and a jump button are your only controls, "collect the gems" and "get to the exit" are the only real goals.
There's an incredibly deep physics system underlying those three buttons, though. No two movements end up exactly the same. The trajectory of your running and jumping depends on the angle of the surface, the length you hold the jump button and, most crucially, your momentum. Maintaining your speed and energy efficiently is difficult at first, but it quickly becomes second nature as you plan wall jumps, slides, and screen-spanning leaps to reach seemingly impossible platforms. Don't let that momentum carry you too far, though, or you'll die to a bone crunching hard landing.
Even grazing a stationary mine, or any of the many varied enemies in the game, results in an explosive ragdoll death, sometimes destroying entire minutes of careful play. Some of these enemies are utterly predictable, moving in easy patterns that you can plan around (though the game often places so many of these in a small space that the "simple" patterns become nearly impossible to handle). Most enemies, though, aren't so simple to avoid: from heat-seeking missiles to turrets that are constantly zeroing in on your position, mercilessly rotating lasers to evil clones that mimic your moves and explode on contact.
N++ adds a few new enemy types—such as a slowly rotating "deathball" that slowly hones in on your position—and a few new ninja-pushing platforms to differentiate it from its brilliant predecessors. But what really sets N++ apart are the new levels. There are over 1,000 single-screen stages in all: a few hundred that are just "intro" levels meant to teach you the basics plus 1,000 more adapted from the original N and N+ (and expanded to fill the HD aspect ratio). There are also co-op and race levels specifically designed to work well for multiplayer gaming. (There's so much stuff that I haven't even touched those yet.)
I've only gotten though a few hundred of these so far, but all have been constructed with obvious care and attention to detail. Many focused on simple puzzles, requiring you to hit a series of switches in the correct order to open up a path (often unleashing trapped enemies as you do). Others are pure skill tests, requiring perfect jumps and pixel-perfect squeezes between enemies. The best slowly unfold themselves so that an obvious path opens up as you traverse them, figuring out the next move just moments before you need to make it. The end result of a completed run is an almost balletic dance through a litany of dangers that looks preordained.
While the intro levels and early stages ease you into things a bit, N++ does get very hard very fast. Even with dozens of hours with its predecessors under my belt, I was spending 10 to 15 minutes on some of the mid-difficulty levels. But the game also lets you choose how hard you want it to be, to a large extent, by using a series of golden, time-extending gems scattered throughout the level. Quite often, ignoring those gems makes a level about 50 times easier, letting you avoid the most difficult traps and head straight for the exit. For masochists like me, though, getting every single gem on every single level will provide a challenge that could easily take over 100 hours.
Plowing head-first into a punishing platforming wall for 15 minutes at a time isn't for everyone, of course. For those that stick it out, the reward is a feeling of satisfaction that's almost completely pure. Unlike most games these days, success comes not from finding a new item or weapon or power for your character. No, every success in N++ comes with the knowledge that you're a little better than you were before you started that level—that you have a newfound skill at this virtual platform navigation that had to be hard-earned through failure, perseverance, and sheer obstinance.
The good
- Simple design: Just run, jump, and get to the exit
- Subtle, momentum-based physics make for elegant platforming
- Extremely tight and considered level design
- Amazing selection of over 2,000 single player levels and hundreds more for multiplayer
The Bad
- Punishing difficulty is not for everyone
- Characters and enemies can look kind of small if you're not close to the TV
The Ugly
- Dying because you failed to jump over the last mine before the exit
Verdict: Buy it if you want to remember what beating a game into submission through pure skill feels like.
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