If you enjoy 2D precision platforming that is geared firmly towards the hardcore speedrunner end of the genre, then I have a new obsession to present to you. Playing God is a new leaderboard-based platforming challenge that puts the player in charge of a duck whose having to descend through the nine circles of hell – or 90 single-screen levels of hell. It sounds absurd yet Playing God can go beak to beak with the likes of 10 Second Ninja and doesn’t fall far behind the Super Meat Boy series either.
The secret sauce of Playing God is found in its basic move set and consistent physics. Dunte the Duck can run, single jump, dash and dash jump to navigate each level. The jump allows Dunte to wall jump and Dunte is incredibly sticky too. Whenever he hits a wall, his wings cling to it and you’ll start to slowly slide down rather than hit and slide at speed into freefall. Dashing helps you slide through low-ceiling areas with small spike pits as jumping won’t help you. Dash jumps are tricky initially to get right and you only have one go until Dunte’s feet hit the firm ground again. Levels often revolve around some timely dash jumps through dangerous arcs where you might need to fall off a ledge briefly and trigger the dash jump. It takes timing, patience and lots of respawns to get it right.
Playing God is hard. There are no checkpoints and each set of 10 levels brings in new ideas for level design. Spikes, bullets, disappearing or rhythmic floor blocks, giant saws and keys for doors might not be anything new but they are built into challenging levels and time goals that require absolute exacting precision and speed. A few levels have multiple routes and finding shortcuts is encouraged. Playing in normal mode brings in the online leaderboard, which is incredibly satisfying and addictive. Seeing what looks like impossible times makes you question your route and skills. Each level has a platinum, gold, silver and bronze clearance time and you need to get a certain amount of gold medals to open up the next batch of levels. One thing that I’d like to see improved is seeing the times for each medal per level so I know what I’m aiming for as it’s a guessing game at the moment. You could be 0.01 seconds off a gold and never know.
To help ease players into Playing God, there are some helpful options available. Casual mode takes you out of the leaderboards but instead of dying whenever you hit a trap, it simply slows you down. This lets a player get used to a level, practice trying out different routes and then settle on a strategy before flipping back to normal mode to tackle it. Your medals earned in casual mode stand too, so it can be a cheeky way to earn golds to unlock the next set of levels if you are having skill problems (like I did). Seeing your corpse turn into a roast duck is funny but my levels were littered with roasties so I flipped to casual mode to open up a few more levels just so I had more variety of levels of attempt. You can end up rage blind with precision platformers and switching up the challenge helps. There are also optional countdowns for levels and some physics changes with the wall jumping which could help players out too.
The last mode of Playing God is a level editor. Unfortunately, I had issues getting this to work, but being able to create and share your own levels for this type of game is a fantastic idea. I’m looking forward to cycling back to see how it all works. It looked quite point-and-clicky – similar to how you build levels in Ultimate Chicken Horse.
Everything here makes Playing God a challenging, meaty but also fair and consistent challenge. All the basics are extremely well done and flow together nicely. Levels aren’t obtuse. Controls and movement are consistent and repeatable. Some might dismiss this because of its fairly simplistic graphical style but I urge you to look beyond that and embrace the rage, chaos and satisfying challenge that speedrunning as a duck will bring. This is a good egg.
Review copy provided by the developer. Playing God is out on Steam.
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