Sunblaze is a precision platformer with a cute art style and brutal difficulty. Most levels are designed to challenge your platforming abilities while also giving you a small puzzle to solve.

Presentation

Sunblaze‘s difficult gameplay differs from its bright, happy aesthetic. It’s a nice dichotomy but nothing exceptionally unique. The bloody deaths of your character contrast with the colorful style of a teenage girl, but it never goes anywhere interesting. Although the hardcore platformer genre is one that typically focuses almost entirely on gameplay, it’s still a missed opportunity to do something unique with the visuals.

Quality-wise, the graphics are great thanks to solid animations and various locations that each have their own theme. The art direction is stylistically consistent but still diverges when it comes to the design of each chapter’s levels.

Sunblaze‘s music is fine. Nothing stuck out to me as an amazing track or something that would grab my attention, but I doubt that was the goal. The music keeps the game lively while allowing you to focus on the platforming; in a different genre, this could be a negative, but here it works well.

Gameplay

The title clearly models itself after games like Celeste and Super Meat Boy. It uses a movement system vaguely similar to Celeste, as well as using a pixel art style, but it isn’t a direct copy. Super Meat Boy‘s excessive difficulty and intricate level design is on display in Sunblaze, but thanks to the vastly different platforming styles, the game feels more unique than it normally would. Emphasizing puzzle elements in its stage design is another fun departure from its two main influences.

Every level, excluding some of the early ones that try to teach you how to play, has a small puzzle to solve. Generally, these are pretty easy, often consisting of a falling platform you need to save for the end or an unusual pattern you need to follow. It never drifts into puzzle game territory, but it’s enough to make you think. To go along with this, each chapter features new stage designs, so even if you don’t enjoy a certain type of platforming mechanic, the next chapter will throw it out and give you something fresh. This makes each chapter very hit or miss. For example, one set of levels uses platforms that need to be attacked in order to make them move. Initially, it’s only used to linearly traverse the stage, but in later ones, it’s used as a puzzle mechanic where you need to move platforms in the correct order to win. It’s an excellent use of basic platforming mechanics to create interesting puzzles, but it’s disappointing when this theme is thrown out and replaced by an underwhelming fireball-based theme that allows you to fly through levels with clunky controls as long as you keep dodging waterfalls. Overall though, the fire chapter is the only one that stands out as a significant downgrade; the rest are enjoyable with a good sense of progression in complexity.

Sunblaze‘s difficulty is another standout feature, but for a different reason than you might expect. Most platformers don’t have a way of making the game easier or harder, so it’s almost impossible for casual and hardcore fans to enjoy the same one. For Sunblaze, this is removed in favor of a variable system with a huge range of customization options. Zen Mode is the most relaxed experience, where levels have actually been redesigned to be easier. Some are outright removed, but you can still play a good portion of the game without much of a challenge. This is excellent for players that are either inexperienced with precision platformers or simply don’t like them. At the default difficulty, stages vary between basic ones that only exist to introduce new mechanics and complex ones intended to challenge your puzzle-solving abilities and your platforming skills. You can also enable certain cheats if you dislike specific gameplay elements. You can give yourself invincibility, extra jumps or dashes, etc. For fans of brutal platformers, Hard Mode can be unlocked by collecting a handful of cubes in each chapter. These levels are the counterpart to Zen Mode in that they are redesigns of existing ones to make them more challenging. After beating the game, you also unlock the Lost Chapter, full of levels that didn’t make the final cut for whatever reason. Quality is somewhat lesser for these, but they’re only intended to be a behind-the-scenes bonus rather than a full-fledged chapter.

Story

The story of Sunblaze is one of its weakest elements. It’s written to be a sweet narrative about a loving father-daughter relationship, but it’s generic and bland. Maybe I would connect with it more if I was a young girl, but as an adult male, it comes off as rather corny. The humor is also a miss for me, with most of the jokes sounding like an adult pretending to be a teenager. The writing rarely takes itself seriously, so it’s hard to get invested in what amounts to a series of jokes. Thankfully, it’s not a major focus and only shows up a few times each chapter, so players only interested in gameplay shouldn’t mind it.

Verdict

Sunblaze isn’t a ground-breaking platformer that will influence the genre for years to come, but it’s still a very well-executed game that achieves what it sets out to do. It allows players to choose between a masochistic challenge and a simple, relaxed experience. It’s easy to recommend to a wide range of platforming fans because it’s not only a great game; it’s also an accessible one.

8/10

• Games From Earth, Bonus Stage Publishing
• Steam, GOG
• $15, $17 (GOG)