There are several indie devs that are committed to bringing 80s arcade action games to the modern audience, and my little heart bounces for joy each time I spot a new one. Freddy Farmer is like a lost 2D platformer from 1984, only it plays with some of the modern quality of life features you take for granted today. It is a challenge, and sometimes the game fights against you, but overall, this is a fun and addictive retro treat.
Freddy Farmer opens with Freddy’s daughter being kidnapped. To save her, the witch you make a pact with asks you to collect dive ingredients from different levels and drop them into the magical cauldron on each level that ignites when you’ve collected them all. The unique twist is that you must collect these five ingredients in a specific order. Collect them out of order, and the game proceeds on, but you’ll be blocked from accessing the final world and asked to redo the levels you got wrong. No wonder Freddy is crying in the score total screen! Collect everything in the right order, and the potion bottle gets filled in for that level, and you move on to the next.
Freddy Farmer is totally defenceless. There is no attack, and his jump is poor. For small monsters like bugs and rolling green slimes, you can leap over them to avoid them. For everything else, resistance is futile. You start off with three lives, and each level has a three-minute timer. The timer itself doesn’t become a direct issue, as I’ve never ran out of time, but what it does do is subconsciously make you rush moves that catch you out. Patience and timing are key to success in Freddy Farmer because the enemy movement patterns are often interlinked, giving you only a short window to run, jump, climb, or swing your way around the level to safety. Some enemies don’t give you the luxury of waiting, like the yeti that throws stones at you, or the beast that chases you around the level. Most other enemies stay on their platform and either patrol or charge at you on sight. Levels are like mini mazes later in the game, too, as they warp off one side and you appear elsewhere higher or lower on the screen. All of this requires timing and patience to get things right, stay alive, and collect everything in the right order.
If you lose all three lives, you are booted back to the main map. There are infinite continues, but you’ll have to start each world again from level 1 of that world. This means you’ll need to get good to regularly reach the 4th or 5th level with enough lives to cover a mistake when going for the correct ingredient order. This setup might cause some frustration, but I honed my skills over time and it forced me to improve my skills. The movement and collision detection is consistent and exacting, so when I died, I felt like it was my fault… all except for one recurring issue that is.
When you die and the game respawns you, some levels respawn you into the path that some enemies patrol. The timing of this often coincides with the enemy being able to box you in and kill you because Freddy has no attack or means of escape. It is pure luck of the draw as to how often this happens, but late game in the Cemetery and Castle levels, it happened repeatedly. I was getting quite annoyed as I was more than capable of killing myself, thank you very much! I didn’t need the game to wipe out continue after continue for me. On normal mode, each world has five levels, but on hard mode, there are seven. This is where I’ve had to tap out for now. I’m not good enough, and this bug is making it worse. There is a third difficulty, and some bonus minigames attached, but I’ve not unlocked them yet.
Despite my groans over the respawn issue, I have enjoyed my time so far with Freddy Farmer. It makes its way from PC to PlayStation this week, so I hope that means there’s a chance to improve the respawn issue in a future patch. It is the only thing preventing me from giving this an 8.5/10 and a great rating. If you miss the 80s arcade action of simple to understand, hard to master platforming challenges, grab this game now. You won’t regret it.
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