Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara

If I had to limit what I think of this game to one sentence, I would say that it has really, really good level design. Just beating a level is going to be pretty easy most of the time. But beating a level [i]fast[/i] is where the fun comes in. Movement is simple: skip, run, jump, roll, and long jump. The secret to going fast is to chain rolls and long jumps together. And the levels felt perfectly designed for going fast. Almost always, platforms were spaced so that I could choose to either use normal jumps or long jumps to progress, and not be forced to do one or the other. If I was brave, I could long jump over pits or [i]onto the scenery[/i] for shortcuts. Every moving platform and trap felt perfectly timed so that, if you go fast, you never have to stop and wait. And chaining long jumps to accomplish this felt really fun. Sometimes I would just zip around town, not even challenging a level, just because I was having fun spamming long jumps all over the place. The overall mood is very cheerful in a sort of "wholesome cartoon" kind of way. This mood and Koa's constant happy shouts during gameplay are infectious, and will probably do a great job cheering you up. There are collectibles that will unlock new shirts, backpacks, ship upgrades, and town repairs, so that's an incentive to explore levels and take on additional challenges. Also, I was impressed to see that changing shirts not only affects the 3D character model, but also her 2D artwork. I don't play many 3D platformers, but this became one of my favorites.

This game is very fun. If you like platformers, it's a must play. It's a lot easier than say a Mario game but it still has plentu of charms and the controls are tight!

Cute platformer with speedrunning elements. A bit on the easy side, for me at least, but it was a lot of fun with a few challenging bits here and there. Controls felt very good, super tight and very fun to run through the levels! There's also some collectibles in the game which are mostly cosmetic, so that's another aspect of it. Beyond that it's another entry in the Chibig Universe so that's always good, I really like this game company!