pokiPooki!! Demo

Getting angry because of a video game might sound silly, but everyone got that point at least once while playing. It obviously doesn’t have to end with a broken controller, but frustration kicks in rather quickly when a simple game appears to be impossible to conquer. On the other hand, this is exactly the reason many people enjoy them.

pokiPooki is a very challenging 2D platformer in which you have to make it to the end of each level by avoiding all the traps in between. It may sound simple in theory, but the traps are anything but that once you see just how precise your commands have to be in order to avoid them. To make matters even worse, the game shows you how many deaths you have accumulated.

There’s no story to distract you from the action, which is a good decision in this case, because no one would have the patience to listen to it anyway. Instead, the full focus of the developer has been on the gameplay mechanics and the level design. Although you can only jump and move from left to right, many difficult tricks are possible if you have the patience to learn them.

Since any mistake is punished with a level restart, it’s imperative that the controls are accurate and responsive, otherwise the frustration would be too much to bear. This way, you know for sure that the only reason  you touched that spike is because of your sloppy reaction times, which gives you a reason to try again and get better at it, at least in theory.

As for the graphics, there’s nothing out of the ordinary at play here, especially when you consider the fact that it’s basically just a collection of glowing lines and the occasional spike. However, it’s not very relevant how everything looks as long as you are having fun, especially since you wouldn’t have time to admire any background artwork anyway.

All things considered, pokiPooki is not an original concept, but it’s a very polished one that should satisfy even the most hardcore platformer fans. Hence, if you are certain in your platforming skills and you have tons of patience to spare, this can certainly keep you busy for a while.