I played the Pepper Grinder demo during Next Fest and I really loved it and I was eagerly anticipating the games release, and I immediately picked it up once it launched. Despite some of the good that crops up during the game, overall Pepper Grinder is a massively, MASSIVELY underwhelming game.

Before I get into the issues I have with the game, I just want to mention that the art and the aesthetic of this game is pretty fantastic. The pixel art, the animation, the color palette, how diverse every level looks, it's all really impressive stuff. Drilling through mountains and volcanoes and icebergs and ruined cities all make for really fun settings for the game. It's just disappointing that all of that feels wasted on levels that don't take advantage of what makes this game great.

Pepper Grinder excels when it's just Pepper, the Grinder, and a whole lot of dirt. The movement is tight, its fun, it's fast and it's got a lot of personality to it. The game throws in some fun gimmicks too like dousing lava with water to allow you to quickly drill through the magma before it melts again, or ice that will break behind you as you drill creating exciting moments of platforming in really unique ways. The game just discards these ideas so quickly that with a run time of roughly 3-4 hours, they feel very underutilized. Some of these ideas only appear once, or maybe twice out of 23 total levels and I just wish there was more I could do with them. And it absolutely does not help that there's so many parts of other levels that focus on all the things that don't make the game fun. Having to shoot rockets at ice takes longer than it needs to, 'combat' sections get old after the first one in level 1, and World 4 is almost entirely focused around these slower, less drilling inspired things. One entire level in World 4 has an entire three places to actually drill, and the rest is filled with unfun autoscroller combat with a machine gun. There's just far too much in this pretty short game that's just frustrating or unsatisfying. But even still, there's a lot of fun to be had when the game isn't focused on all the things that aren't fun. If the whole game was like this, it wouldn't feel so bad, except for one giant glaring problem: the bosses.

The boss battle in this game are outright bad. There's unfortunately not a single one that is fun, they're tedious and frustrating to fight and show off every single flaw the game has on offering. This game is just not built for these, they don't add anything to the experience and actively detract from it. The final boss in particular is especially bad, the first phase is fine (even though halfway through the AI broke for me), but the 2nd phase is genuinely a slog to fight. It's like one of the worst combat arenas I've experienced in a game since the good old Capra Demon fight in Dark Souls.
Just all round really frustrating bosses that do nothing to enhance the strengths of this game.

Maybe I went in expecting the wrong things, but this package has overall left me largely disappointed. So if you are like me, and you played the demo and really loved the fast paced drilling action and wanted to get this for more of that, I cannot recommend Pepper Grinder for how misused this games mechanics are that get focused on all the wrong things.

I thought the game would mainly be about digging/moving through the environment, but the developers wanted to switch up each world into something new, which unfortunately doesn't work out. Now its a 2d shooter, now its a jumping between trucks, now you got a grapple hook with awkward controls, now you got a mech.... I'd much rather the focus more on the central mechanic.

Everything feels slightly off in some way. Bosses are more infuriating than fun to fight against. You can buy extra health, but it only lasts one life. You can heal at specific spots in a level, but if you reach a checkpoint with low health why not just kill yourself and continue with full health? So many small weird design choices that ends up bogging the game down.

So beware that you may not get as much of the mechanic this game is promoted with, as you may think.

I've never been so torn about a game.
My play-through was filled with great highs but also so many excruciating lows.

Highs: Smooth silky drilling goodness, fun game art, great OST.
Lows: Inconsistent and rage inducing controls, boring boss fights, mindless gimmicks, game length (very short), and many many more.

I guess all I want to say is PLEASE, JUST LET ME DRILL. No gimmicks, no filler. Just drilling.

Pepper Grinder has been on my watchlist for many years. I was anticipating it highly since its main mechanic looked really engaging. The fact that Devolver was the publisher also increased the hype for me, thus, I purchased Pepper Grinder as soon as it was released.

So what do we have here, is it a bad game? No, but it is a huge letdown for me. This game has been in development for 7 years and has a powerful publisher behind it. But the major issue with Pepper Grinder is throughout my journey, it felt like the game lacked content. By a lot. This mechanic could have been used way better, with way more varied level design. There are a few levels that have some ideas, but they wear out quickly. The music is nothing surprising. The pixel art looks good.

The bosses are terrible, they lack any imagination and play very poorly. I liked the final boss though. The controls are not bad, but they aren't as responsive and smooth as they should be for a platformer-action game. And why is there this much action in this game? It surely doesn't fit the main mechanic of this game and doesn't play well. Pepper Grinder should have been a game solely focused on combat.

There aren't any upgrades to purchase and we don't have any control over our tools/equipment, meaning we have no control over our playstyle.

Overall, Pepper Grinder feels like a wasted potential with this little content. It just feels uninspiring in every aspect. I won't recommend it to anyone unless it's like at least 50% off. This is surely a miss from Devolver Digital for me.



Follow My Curator Page ❤️

I have many different frustrations with Pepper Grinder, it was unfortunately the final boss that pushed my review from mixed/mildy positive to outright negative.

First, to get it out of the way, Pepper Grinder looks great! and sounds great! and it's an interesting core mechanic! A+ in all of these. There also seems to be a significant amount of additional playtime for people interested in Time Trials, not my thing but I know that's a bonus for some players.

This game is both easy and hard at the same time and for all of the wrong reasons.
- It's easy because it's straightforward, 90% of the skull coins are practically in your direct path. The levels are so linear there's no option of doing something wrong, every single jump is outlined with coins.
- It's easy because combat in levels is a joke, you hold the drill button and walk at them. Enemies will often run up to you and stand still.
- It's easy because there is no punishment for dying. You return to the nearest checkpoint, which are very frequent, and any money you had picked up after hitting the checkpoint returns to it's place in the level. But skull coins, the collectibles that actually matter, are *scored* when you die. You only ever need to touch a skull coin once for it to be permanently unlocked.

- It's hard because this is a platformer with no air control. The moment your drill leaves dirt you are in the physics engine's hands. How good are you at flicking between precise angles on a joystick? Because that's the only skill that matters here.
- It's hard because the grapple mechanic is terrible. I have never encountered a game mechanic that requires more twitch-reflex than these. I 100% Sekiro, I was on a competitive FPS team, I could not beat this game until I used the option to lower the speed at which the game ran. The game, by the way, does not look or sound nearly as good when jittering in slow-mo.
- It's hard because the bosses suck. Combat is nearly non-existent in levels, bosses are exclusively combat -- Winning combination there folks. The fights are sloppy, I could not figure out the "right way" to fight any of them! It was an exercise in scraping by every time. Low player health + low player damage + high boss health makes for a miserable experience.

I can't help but feel that the gameplay took backseat in the development of Pepper Grinder. I expected a more finely tuned experience from a game with so few levels.

the boss fights in this game are an affront to mankind.

It's an okay game. The art is very well done and I had fun, but not sure I'd recommend it.

The controls aren't great, mostly holding RT down the whole time but have to occasionally release and re-press to perform an action which sometimes isn't super intuitive since the X button is used to start the action, and pressing RT ends it (grapple). Also sometimes you continue digging if you clear a gap while not holding RT and sometimes you don't; This isn't a problem for 99% of the game until the final boss.

There are jewels you collect throughout the levels, but can really only be used for stickers. It probably would've taken 5+ minutes to empty my jewel bank into the sticker machine. I guess they mostly just server as indicators on how to proceed through the level.

You'll take damage on somethings that are confusing, like running into an enemy while you have your drill on, but sometimes not.

The primary digging mechanic of the game is fun, but that doesn't really evolve in any meaningful way throughout the game so it's a good that this game doesn't go on any long than the 3-4 hours it is.

I found the the game to be pretty easy overall with the final boss being a pretty big spike in difficulty.

You see the main drill mechanic and you'd think how can this not be fun but I found myself more aggravated with it than anything. It just didn't translate that well as a core mechanic for a game. Something about the way it controlled was too chaotic. I felt the level of precision needed vs what the controls allowed just didn't align, especially the ability to change direction suddenly felt hit and miss. If you entered a small block at a bad angle, it didn't matter how quickly you could react, there was nothing you could do to correct it.

Some areas verged on Super Meat Boy level tedium where you die until you remember the button timing and sequence to get through it and I'm just not a fan of that style of gameplay. Perhaps I just expected this to be something different than what it turned out to be.

I found the shop element particularly disappointing. The temporary health boost was the only useful item but just wasn't worth getting. Both because of the hassle of needing to leave and re-enter a level but especially on the 2 stage bosses. If you died on the second stage of a boss you just restart from the second stage again. It was less annoying just to tough it out with lower health and keep doing that than it was to leave, get the temporary health boost then start from stage 1 again hoping you don't die because it would have been all for nothing. Then if you also don't care about the cosmetics or stickers (the only other items to spend gems on), collecting gems was rendered pointless. I would have love to have seen some upgrade mechanics.

It did try to introduce a new mechanic in each level to keep the gameplay fresh but I felt they were all kind of lackluster. I found myself getting through levels just for the sake of getting to the next one and not really enjoying any particular level. I definitely didn't feel the urge to go back and play through any.

The bosses were on a whole other level of annoying, at times it felt like there was nothing you can do to avoid getting hit, if you went in the wrong direction, accidentally came out of the ground at the wrong angle or were in the air at the wrong time, there was nothing you could do. On top of that there just straight up weren't fun or interesting to battle, they were all just jumping and drilling through the boss. The last boss especially was something else... his second stage can burn in hell.

The ONLY reason I pushed through to the end of this game was because it's so short.

I'm no stranger to challenging games, I don't shy away from building up the skill to overcome difficulty, when I feel like I'm still enjoying the experience. For some reason I just did not enjoy the experience this time.

A charming platformer with a great central mechanic. However a combination of infuriating level design and bosses make it a tough sell. I frankly couldn't put up with all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game throws at you such as buggy grapple points, weird hitboxes, and the fact that you basically have no i-frames. I sadly do not recommend Pepper Grinder...

Honestly disappointed with this game. It's unfortunate because I have enjoyed every other game this publisher published. This game is incredibly short, I beat it in just under two hours, and that includes the time I left the game running to eat lunch. Normally I wouldn't say that’s necessarily a bad thing but this game could have been improved by a longer playtime.

While each level has a unique gimmick its never expanded on. Pretty much at all. The only exception I can think of is the Machine Gun powerup which is used in a slightly more interesting towards the end of the game. Out of all the bosses only the first one was remotely interesting after the first attempt, all other bosses are just “Figure out the three different attacks.”

Throughout the game I kept waiting in anticipation for the challenge levels which never came. There is a good basic game here but the final product feels more like a tech demo than anything else