Very fun, fluid and unique platformer.

cool and fun

Penny's Big Breakaway is an exceedingly underrated, but flawed, 3D platformer. If you're a fan of any fast-paced platforming game, you will not be disappointed! Imagine if you took Mario Odyssey's movement and made it fast. That's this game. It looks great, sounds great, and plays great (with caveats). It is quite short, only 6 hours, but the emphasis is likely on replayability for the longevity of this game (find hidden collectibles, get max rank on stages etc.)

You can see for yourself, but the artstyle is vibrant, colourful, and very appealing. It would fit right in with a modern retro-styled platformer. The music is very energetic and is generally full of bangers. I started playing this game for the music alone. The story is basic, as you'd expect for this type of game. It has charming 2D stylised cutscenes sprinkled throughout too, probably more effort than necessary for a game of this scope, but it is nice!

The movement system in this game is exceedingly satisfying and very expressive. Your character has this yoyo which is used to move around. Pressing a button, you shoot the yoyo, and if you press it again, you are pulled towards it, giving you speed. If you hold the button while the yoyo is extended, you swing on it. You can combine this with the "dash"-like move the yoyo gives you, letting you build an immense amount of momentum. To maintain speed, you press another button to ride your yoyo. This is somewhat hard to control, but I guess that's the point. If you're not riding your yoyo, you'll run at a snail's pace. There are a few other primitive move mechanics and power-ups, but that's the gist of it.

The movement system feels amazing, all centered around the yoyo, which can also make the character quite hard to control sometimes. Because your yoyo can't be in two places at once, sometimes you'll want to swing or boost or otherwise do something with it, but you can't, which means your input is basically dropped. This makes it feel like the character is quite unresponsive at times. I'm not sure if there's a way to really fix this, but it does mean the movement system takes some getting used to to reach full fluidity.

After you reach mastery with the movement system, you can easily break levels. If you watch some speed runs of this game, you'll see how broken the movement system is to its fullest. Casually, you can easily skip parts of the level or mechanics at leisure once you're used to it. Zooming through levels is a bit at odds with the side objectives in levels, however. Side objectives in this game are little tasks such as "collect 3 papers," "destroy this block;" they're contextualised in the level with NPCs. While this is quite neat, it means you need to read and understand the context of the task given to you, which breaks the flow-state of the levels on your first playthrough. The game would have benefitted from some standardised way to communicate this to the player, as the text for these quests is at the top of the screen and quite tiny, so you need to heavily divert your attention for them.

Another rough edge this game has is depth perception. There have been a lot of times where it looks like you'll land on a platform or make a jump, and you fall into the abyss. It's quite a bummer to the flow-state the game encourages you into.

For getting max rank in stages, there's a "trick" system that encourages you to be moving constantly, never touching the ground, always jumping, riding your yoyo, etc. This makes fast, subsequent, and smooth movement feel rewarding. However, there are NPCs littered around the place with dialogue that, on a first playthrough, you may want to read, which is, again, at odds with the fast-paced nature of the game.

It is worth noting that each stage has 3 collectibles hidden throughout that are used to unlock bonus stages. It's always hard to hide these in a way that doesn't interfere with the fast-paced nature of this game, but the short levels they unlock are a nice reward and give reason to replay the levels.

Sadly, while the game has some rough edges, some of these edges are just bad. The game does contain some bugs; you may fall through the floor or phase through a wall and die. They're quite rare though, in my time playing it probably happened around 4-5 times.

Some parts are just bad design. The game has bosses; they're nothing crazy, sometimes clunky. However, the penguin boss is god-awful. Hugely inaccurate hit boxes, unclear attack patterns, the game would genuinely be better without it. Likewise, parts of some levels are just bad; for instance, near the end of the game, you need to ride up a wall with your yoyo. It feels like RNG controls the direction to move Penny during this section; sometimes she moves, sometimes she doesn't. It feels like they were aware of this, since there's an oddly placed checkpoint just before this section (in total it lasts like 10 seconds?) just before the end of the level. Again, the level would be better without it. There are other instances of precision platforming that are quite difficult due to the nature of the movement system that could be made more lax.

The biggest issue is by far the camera. It makes finding collectables, doing quests and general exploration a large pain. Some sections the camera was specifically placed in a certain way and it just makes playing so much worse. Likely a compounded problem by the fact that depth perception in this game is difficult.

I think with more time, these would be ironed out. It feels like the game had to be pushed out just before they could add the final finishing touches for these rough edges.

The game is fantastic, pick it up! As stated above, there are odd times the game dips in quality or has some design issues, but they're small enough you won't notice keenly. Shortcuts are abundant, so any death due to such flaws is only a setback of less than 30 seconds.

I look forward to replaying this game in the future!