Platformers are probably my personal perfect genre. Precise play pleases me, plus picking up plenty to progress… OK starting as many words as possible with ‘p’ is proving problematic so perhaps I’ll pause persisting at present.
Awesome Pea is a 2D platformer game where you take control of Greedy Pea; at least according to the end screen they’re called Greedy Pea, maybe in an attempt to subvert expectations or something. Greedy Pea has a few very basic abilities: moving left or right, jumping and double-jumping. Being a pea, they aren’t a very tough character and will always go down when hit by any projectiles, traps or the usual bottomless pits (poor thing). But still, they push onward through every level to collect coins and jewels… I guess “Greedy Pea” makes sense after all.
Greedy Pea controlled really nicely the entire play-through. Jumping was tight, landing on even the smallest platform was easy and overall it felt precise to make my way through each stage. The stages are filled with a decent variety of obstacles too, featuring everything from skulls flying across the screen to snowballs (or at least they looked like snowballs) rising up from below. I really appreciated the shifts in level design as well. Levels flip-flopped between all sorts of arrangements. Horizontal, vertical, snaking, you name it. It does everything it can to keep the game feeling fresh even with its very basic move-set and end goal.
The unique selling point in my opinion though is definitely the aesthetic. While I don’t personally have an overwhelming nostalgia for GameBoy games having only ever played the odd virtual console title, I still really appreciated how faithful the art style was to that era and the GB style was maintained throughout. My only real criticism on the graphics front is that you can’t tweak the CRT and tube effects without returning to the main menu, an odd choice when there’s a perfectly good pause menu implemented in the game already, and when the GB was a handheld system anyway. No volume, accessibility or even “reset save” options are in there either.
There are a couple other things that are sadly lacking from the game as well. Firstly, it doesn’t track your fastest times in levels, which is really weird since it has a timer displaying already and even has a button set to immediately reset the level for quick retries. The foundations are already there for a time-trial or speed-run mode and that would help significantly with replay value. As is, once you’ve collected everything and finished the thirty levels (something which took me roughly three hours) there’s not much else to do. I was also disappointed by the lack of a completion reward for collecting everything; an extra level or even just a message in the credits complimenting your achievement would have been greatly appreciated.
Apart from those nit-picks though, Awesome Pea does make for a fun platformer. It’s frequently challenging but rarely frustrating, and manages to get a lot out of its strong but simple foundation. If you like your platformers or simply have that nostalgic sweet-spot for GameBoy games, this title is definitely worth picking up, and I’m hopeful there’ll be a peaquel down the line as well (I’m not apologising).
A digital copy of Awesome Pea was supplied for Switch by the developer.