Pudding UP!

"Pudding UP!" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This platformer eschews the usual left right/up down/jump controls for a basic mobile phone slingshot mechanic (think Angry Birds). It was clearly designed for mobile phones, but where Apple and Google have QA departments, Valve has "Steam Direct". Apart from looking at the mildly amusing pudding theme, all you do here is slingshot yourself around supermarket themed 2D backdrops and wonder what the point of it all is. There is none. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal. While I couldn't find this on the mobile app stores, everything about it looks and feels like it's a mobile a…

Pudding UP! is a cute little platformer that caught me off guard with how difficult it actually is. I play as a tiny pudding trying to escape from a supermarket and refrigerator, and the simple presentation makes the challenge feel even more brutal. I liked the contrast between the adorable food themed world and the fact that one bad move can send me all the way back to the beginning. The main mechanic is wonderfully simple. I drag the pudding to control its jumps, which sounds easy until I actually have to deal with the game's precise platforming. Every jump needs to be planned carefully because the movement is much less forgiving than the cute visuals suggest. I enjoyed learning how far I could move and how to use the bouncing objects to reach areas that initially seemed impossible. The food characters and bounce based mechanics give the levels some personality. Some of the little food shaped characters help me, while others can get in my way, and I liked that they make the environments feel more alive. Finding alternate paths and shortcuts also gives me a reason to experiment rather than simply following the obvious route. The presentation is probably my favorite part. Everyt…