Summit
Summit’s most obvious point of comparison is Celeste, another game that also has a free Playdate remake of the PICO-8 version. The biggest difference for me between Celeste and Summit, though, is the sense of weight in the latter. You are climbing a mountain, trying to reach the peak, but you are wearing all the gear that you have to wear to climb a mountain in real life. It’s warm and it’s heavy. You have your little climbing spikes and you’re pretty good at dodging falling rocks and you wish you were a bird sometimes, able to fly to the peak without really trying. Well, the wind is bad sometimes. That can’t be easy on the birds. But this isn’t a fast platformer. Each jump feels like it takes real effort.
You’re this little guy with your brother (never pictured), and the story is told in short snippets of text in between levels. Each stage is a single screen with a clear exit (arrow sign) and many obstacles, but most of them are spikes. You have unlimited replays, and there are also ten golden cups to collect through the game for completionists. It’s not an overly long game (I beat it my first time through in about half an hour, with just over 100 deaths), and compared to Celeste, I Wanna Be The Guy, Super Meat Boy, and other games of that style, it’s not the hardest one I’ve played by a long shot. This one is beatable with a little perseverance!
The weight of your little protagonist takes a while to get used to, but eventually you’ll figure out how high you can jump, and where you need to stick your spikes into the wall. Unlike many games of this kind, you have to manually push a button to stick to the wall instead of your character just sticking, or sticking then slowly sliding down. The learning curve is there, but it’s not insurmountable. You’ll eventually get some new items and some crank-based, Flappy Bird-esque levels for variety.
The only thing is that I want more! There are about 70 precision platforming levels, but I remember playing Super Meat Boy for hours and hours and hours, trying to get that perfect run. This one is a lot slower than SMB, but the “one more time” feeling made it hard to put down, even when my hand started to cramp up because I was paying more attention to the screen than maybe any other Playdate game to date. Is this the best platformer on the console? It really might be.
Final note: I saw someone on Twitter beat it in over an hour, and the Itch.io comments are more 2-3 hours of playtime, so your final time might vary dramatically. I’m kind of a platformer expert, though! Still, if this sounds like your thing you should definitely check it out. It’s on sale on Catalog until July 8 if you act fast.