Spinch

Queen Bee Games’ Spinch is a wonderfully designed 2D platformer where you play as a little white blob-dude who must run, dash and jump around a wacky, colourful world to rescue little white blob-kids. It’s a brutally challenging game that can only be described as an acid trip, due to it’s significant use of rainbow colours and weird, wacky and wonderful level designs. Award-winning Canadian cartoonist Jesse Jacobs is who to thank for this, as his mind was truly allowed to just run wild when creating the overall designs of Spinch - and it really works well.

Throughout the game’s six worlds, you’ll find levels of varying difficulty with different challenges to face. You need to get through each level, rescuing three little baby-Spinches in each, by running around and perfectly timing your jumps and dashes through obstacles to survive. If you die, don’t worry, you can just try, try and try again - with a lot of dying in between.

Spinch’s use of rainbow colours adds a beautiful, decorative vibe and it works really well. Your characters simple white body, along with the collectible white cubes throughout the levels make for an interesting look, and ensures that all the colours pop. The sound design of Spinch perfectly complements the wackiness on screen, with a very bouncy soundtrack - done by James Kirkpatrick, using a combination of modded GameBoys and hand-made instruments - that fits everything from the movement to the colours fantastically.

The intense levels are really addictive, and with a super quick restart that gets you right back to the action upon death just eggs you on further. It’s surprisingly difficult to tear yourself away from, even when the difficulty kicks it up a notch in the latter three worlds. Gathering up all the baby-Spinches will prepare you for taking on the final boss, where these little guys get used as ammo - Why? You might ask… I really don’t know! - and throughout your journey you may also come across your cousin, who enables you to unlock bonus levels where you just might gain some bombs to use against the final boss.

Controls are tight, which makes Spinch an absolute joy to play. Learning the layout of a level and the precise moments where you’ll need to jump or dash is a lot of fun despite the frustration when you fail. There’s a slight issue with frame rates dropping when things get hectic on screen, but this was never too much of a frequent occurrence for me thankfully.

Levels are timed, allowing for plenty of replayability as you try to improve upon each level, and backtracking for collectibles is fun due to how fast-paced everything is. Priced at £11.29 on the Nintendo eShop, it’s a great price for a game that will keep you thoroughly entertained for hours.

In the end, we decided to give Spinch the Collecting Asylum rating of 8/10.

Have you played Spinch yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Akupara Games for the Spinch Nintendo Switch review code!