What would you do if a load of pirates stole your hard-earned booty and the only tool you could find to get your stuff back was an oversized drill? Well, Pepper Grinder proffers an answer: you’d turn that drill into a sort of weapon-cum-vehicle and chase them down.
Over the course of a short runtime, across four worlds that each offer up a handful of levels, you’ll zip around, tunnelling through soft earth to burst out into the soft underbellies of enemies. As you go, you’ll be building your momentum to jump across gaps, boosting when you can. In homage to a fairly obvious inspiration, you end each level by drilling to spin a flag up its pole.
Like any traditional platformer, each world concludes with a boss stage, and these feature noticeable spikes in difficulty (thankfully mitigated by a superb difficulty option that lets you literally turn the speed of the game down). Normal stages, though, are all about movement, as you snake around underground trying to find the right line to progress through the next section of platforming.
This platforming feels great, and once grappling and boosts are in the mix you’ll have a nice blend of options at your hands to get through levels. Each one also hides five coins that, when collected, can be put toward cosmetics and keys that unlock a bonus stage per world, which are well worth exploring.
Relatively generous checkpointing means that you won’t generally find yourself forced to restart levels, and Pepper Grinder also has some nice twists on its central ideas, including underwater sections and stomping controllable robots. Still, by the close of its three-to-four-hour run, you’ll be repeating these ideas a little, and Pepper Grinder ends up feeling like it probably didn’t have much more to give, which means you’ll only be disappointed if you’re looking for a mammoth set of levels.
Pepper Grinder’s look is also really sprightly (pun intended): its pixel art is simple and well-executed, with occasionally characterful animations, and the whole thing’s backed by a funky soundtrack. This might not be the most substantial of platformers, but it’s a spirited entry.