💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › sonic-mania.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:36:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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The modern 2D Sonic platformer, released for the franchise's 25th anniversary, and, famously, developed by Sonic fan-game creator Christian Whitehead, among others. Supposedly this is a love letter to the franchise. But I've never played any Sonic games before, so will the love and enthusiasm rub off on me as well?
Kinda, I'm not sure. I did get the sense that Sonic Mania is an extremely polished - maybe even perfected - 2D Sonic game. But I'm not sure if I like that "genre" in the first place.
A lot has been said about Sonic platformers, and I kinda agree with the usual criticisms that I hear. When you run fast, you bump into enemies and obstacles, and when you go slow, well... I must give credit to the developers for the sheer size and complexity of some of the levels, but honestly exploring them felt like navigating a maze sometimes, and when each stage has a time limit, it feels discouraging to try go anywhere but "forward".
Since I couldn't really "speedrun" anything on first try, and didn't enjoy exploring much, I ended up kinda mindlessly wandering through most of the levels, just seeing what the game had to offer. This is still a pretty good time, since the levels are often gorgeous, and moment-to-moment gameplay was pretty fun! But, I don't know, maybe I just suck, but I was never comfortable with pushing the game to its limits in any way; I ended up not finding very many Secret Rings, failing some of them (and you cannot retry if you fail!), so I got a bad ending, and did not feel like restarting. In my frustration I gave the game a *7/10* score.
Was that score justified? I don't know, it was more than 2 months ago; at the time of writing, I have become a completely different person since then, and I am not responsible for previous me's actions or thoughts, fuck you.
I played this on Steam, and I don't remember having any issues. It's a 2D game so it can run on pretty much anything remotely modern with no problem.
Game finished 2023-07-17 - more than three months ago, oof - 7h
gardenapple - 2023-10-20
