DOWNWELL’s Spiritual Successor Remains Shackled To Netflix | POINPY Review
Begging the Heavens for a Miracle Release…
Begging the Heavens for a Miracle Release…
From the great Ojiro Fumoto of DOWNWELL fame, and presented by Devolver Digital, Netflix Subscribers™ are given the chance to play POINPY, an incredible mobile game.
DOWNWELL, the game Ojiro Fumoto made before POINPY, is still my favorite mobile game of all time. Naturally, because of their shared creator, I can’t help but think about the two together. While different in many ways, POINPY shares a lot of common DNA with its sibling DOWNWELL, in its abilities, vertical movement, enemy behaviors, themed zones, etc. But for every similarity there is a divergence, the greatest of which, is the progression system.
Unlike DOWNWELL, your progression is dependent on your total ‘Juice Score’, which is a point value that at the end of every stage, gets added to a large pool of unlockable skills that make your attempts to beat the game more bearable. In a sense, DOWNWELL plays like a rogueLIKE, and POINPY plays like a rogueLITE. Extra jumps, equipment slots, and golden seeds (the games' currency) come from the Juice Score system, all of which makes the game much easier as you inch your way to victory, completing recipes for the big, blue, juice-crazed monster. The progression, does seem to take a long time and admittedly does feel artificially high. I imagine it has been engineered to keep the player engaged with it longer or in more frequent bursts of playtime to match Netflix binging. But even through its imposed tedium, I found myself enjoying it through its end.
Abilities or skills, are not earned in between stages as they are in DOWNWELL, but through unlocking slots for them. You can “pin” abilities that you’ve unlocked from the slot machine, so long as you have an open slot. These can vary in how useful they are, on a range from so helpful it’s kind of breaking the game (like infinite spin), to just being mildly helpful giving you wiggle room in your health, or something like that. Some of them synergize as well, and it’s fun to experiment with different combinations to see what kind of wild interactions you can pull off.
One thing the game doesn’t have after you’ve gotten all of its achievement based medals, and obtained everything out of the vending machine, is replayability. Sure, I could keep it on my phone and open it up every once in a while, but there wouldn’t be a point, because there’s not a true, challenging “endless mode”. The endless mode that you unlock when you do beat the game for the first time, is quite literally endless in the sense that it makes you unkillable. Here, you can try for high juice scores, which is helpful for obtaining a few challenging medals. But after that, there is no purpose to it. I’m a bit disappointed that there isn’t an endless mode where I could try to complete recipes for as long as possible to get the highest score. This could tie into some kind of leaderboard with Netflix friends, or even just a worldwide standing. I feel like it’s squandered potential, and without it, POINPY loses its draw as something I want to play on my phone, because I’ve completed it. Not every game necessarily needs to be infinitely replayable, but when it’s a stone's throw away from the system it has in place, it’s hard to dismiss.
The lack of an endless mode does sting, but it needs to be said that there aren’t even any leaderboards, for any of the game! There isn’t a worldwide leaderboard. You can’t compare scores with other people hooked to your Netflix account. Most egregiously, your best scores aren’t tracked, so you can’t even compete with yourself. There’s nothing but the game. Again, POINPY is a fun game, and not every game needs this. But again, without some pull of a goal of any kind, there’s no reason for me to play after completing it. To a degree, I get it, DOWNWELL doesn’t have an endless mode… but it does have a hard mode, and it does have a leaderboard. I’ve 100% completed that game, own every palette, and have obtained the Tomato. Yet, I still play it. But I can’t say that I will be doing the same for POINPY, and I’m sad about that. Maybe this could change with a future update, but this is as it stands at the time of writing [2022].
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved just about every second of my time with POINPY. I just wish there was a little something more. Maybe a “100% medals” secret of some kind would have been enough for me to keep it on my phone. Maybe if the rank continued to increase for no reason, other than “number go up”. Perhaps if there was a daily challenge to use a random or curated selection of equipment. Maybe there could be color palette changes like DOWNWELL to unlock new looks for the game… I don’t know! After DOWNWELL, I was just expecting something just a little bit more than bragging rights and fun memories. Perhaps if you don’t have any history of DOWNWELL you’ll feel totally differently, but I can’t say for certain.
I’d like to think this is an intentional development choice because you have to sign up for Netflix to be able to play it. Maybe Ojiro wanted the game to have a definitive end so that gamers could subscribe temporarily to Netflix and play through the whole game before their subscription expired. But on the other hand, there has to be an end to the exclusivity contract, right? That can’t be the only way to play it forever, right? Because, despite some of my criticism, that would be downright devious.
If you have a Netflix subscription, playing POINPY is literally one of the best things you can do with it. But if you don’t have a subscription, and POINPY is all you want to do on Netflix, it’s just not worth signing up for a subscription for it… I hope for all of our sakes that it’s only a matter of time before it’s released from Netflix to the public. When that happens, It’ll be a great time to pick it up. Now, if POINPY was more replayable, or was designed with more end game goals, I might think differently. But as it stands, that’s how I feel. I’m VERY happy for Ojiro to get a huge pile of money from Devolver and Netflix to create this game, but I wish it didn’t come with some of the drawbacks.
Ultimately, despite my unmet expectations for it, I truly do recommend POINPY, and can tell you full-heartedly that I had an absolute blast playing and completing it. In your own time, I recommend you do the same… But, the game's journey with me ends here. I suppose, while I look for my next mobile game fix… I’ll keep playing more DOWNWELL.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.