Spinch
Nintendo Switch

Developed By : Queen Bee Games
Published By : Akupara Games
Category : Platformer, Action, Arcade
Release Date : Sep 03, 2020

All our lives we’re told to avoid judging books by their covers. But, as gamers, I’m pretty sure this is something that we’re all willingly guilty of. Whether it’s a setting, a theme, or even a style of graphics, we all have our preferences and will accept or reject a game based off a few images of it. For me, one of those things that I judge in that instant is a game’s color scheme. More specifically whether or not I think the color palate is going to be murder on my eyes. So, after taking a quick look at Spinch on the Nintendo Switch, I was worried that seeing the game in action would leave me feeling (or wanting to be) blind.

You’ll take control of the titular character, Spinch, described as a “hyper-agile organism”. Spinch’s litter of offspring have gone missing and naturally you need to go out and find them. The only problem, your world’s also been invaded by a gang of oddities, and you’ll need to get through them to find your litter.

Spinch has the ultimate arsenal of moves that make any good platformer a…well, a good platformer. He can run, jump, wall climb, swim, and dash. All of these are available to you right away, and are all taught to you in the game’s tutorial before you jump into the first actual level. The dash can be triggered on the ground as a quick, short-burst sprint, or once while in the air.

The game is made up of a handful of worlds, each with a handful of levels. As you’d expect, your goal in each level is to just to get to the end, but there’s quite a bit of challenges in your way. These challenges come in the form of both platforming and enemies, but you’ll have a few checkpoints to trigger on the way. There’s also boxes to collect which can give you temporary invincibility, but most importantly there’s your children.

Why are your children so important? Well, aside from the fact that…you know, they’re your children, you’ll actually need them to fight the bosses with since they serve as your ammunition. Yes, you just read every word of that sentence correctly.

Every boss arena is equipped with a giant gun-contraption with two button, and a tube that is filled with all of your offspring that you’ve found in that world. You’ll need to stand on one of the buttons to “load” the offspring, sending them through the tube to the other side of the arena. Then you’ll need to cross over yourself, avoiding the boss, to activate the other button which fires them back across the arena, hopefully striking the boss and causing damage in the process.

The platforming genre has been flooded since forever. And, I’ve said this plenty of times and I’m sure plenty of people would agree, if you focus just on the gameplay and mechanics there’s not much original from game to game. So it’s a nice touch when even something small about a game can feel different. While not much felt different about Spinch I did really enjoy that they found a way to keep the platforming the focus during boss fights even, instead of giving you a way to attack directly.

The game is a bit on the shorter side, so if you’re looking for a long experience you might not find it here. Each level is fairly quick, there aren’t a lot of them, and once you finish them there’s really no excuse to replay them. In fact, the only thing that’s enjoyable to replay is the boss levels, and even they aren’t very dynamic in their attack patterns. So overall, a very fun game, but the shelf life of it isn’t all that long.