Review - The End is Nigh
Do you want to die? Normally I’d recommend Dark Souls, but The End it Nigh will have to do. This is a game in what I call the precision platformer genre. You know, with Super Meat Boy and other platformers that make you want to kill yourself and the developers while you play them. It has tight controls and a few key difference from its predecessors that sets The End is Nigh apart from the others.
The gameplay is pretty similar to any other platformer. The player can jump, run, grab ledges, and swim to move from the entrance to the exit of a particular screen. Every screen is a self-contained puzzle, meaning that there are no issues in screen panning that could obfuscate any trap or platform from the player’s view. The most important part about any precision game is the quality of the controls. I can tell you that the controls in this game are tight. The player always has full control over the avatar at any time.
However, there is a slight problem with the controls. There are two main portions of the game. One is the exploration of the world, that being the main experience, and the other is playing levels that the player unlocks by finding game cartridges hidden throughout the world. When playing the “cart levels”, as the game would call them, the player enters a pixelated experience that is meant to emulate old-timey platformers. From playing some of these levels, the controls appear to be a lot less precise than in the world. I don’t know if this is just the different levels of visual feedback given by the modern form as opposed to the old look, or if there really is a significant difference in the tightness of the controls.
So, given that this game is looking for difficulty in its platforming, we have to look at that level of difficulty. The End is Nigh strikes a very healthy balance between doable level designs and super difficult challenges. All of the levels are understandable and not overly difficult to progress through. Heck, I managed to get through the levels, so it can’t be that difficult. Of course, there is a lot of death involved in the process but you get the idea. Unlike some of its predecessors like Super Meat Boy, a lot of the complexity in the levels is created through rush mechanics. Almost every other level has something that will fall to block the path or kill the player or some form of killer hazard that has to be quickly passed through (like clouds of poison gas). By utilizing rush mechanics so thoroughly, the levels can be made more compact and slightly simpler while keeping the difficulty higher. This was really nice in that these rushed maps almost always presented the player with the path that needed to be taken while the real difficulty was in following that path. This played more to a feeling of mastery over each level that I really enjoyed.
While the levels themselves are doable, each level also has a hidden collectible called a “tumor.” These were the real difficulty in The End is Nigh. To get these often required running a gauntlet this is ten times more difficult that the level itself while still having to complete the level afterwards. In addition, there are the cartridge levels that increase difficulty. Each of these levels gives you only a scant twenty lives to complete a set of more difficult levels. I think that this division was a great move. By having more difficulty embedded in each level or in separate areas, The End is Nigh created an experience that can cater to both the die-hard masochists of the platforming world and the more casual gamer that just wants the experience. Both will come away bloodied and bruised, but at least they can both enjoy the experience on some level.
The narrative of the game is a bit of an interesting point. The player is placed in control of a person who appears to have lived through some terrible apocalypse. The goal is to find the pieces to build him a new friend. I think that there was a lot that could have been done with the environment. It has an almost Binding of Isaac atmosphere to it at times. However, I don’t think it was properly utilized. There are hints to the causes of the catastrophe like polluted water and poison smog, but they exist as flavor for the world rather than narrative points. What story does exist is a bit more difficult for me to say. Most of the informative dialogue exists in hidden areas and I won’t pretend that I’ve seen all of them at this point. However, I wasn’t impressed by what I saw. The End is Nigh, like most of its genre, doubles down on gameplay. The narrative just isn’t as developed as the slick controls.
With that being said, the aesthetic does work quite well. The feel of the world is not compromised much by the lack of story. Every enemy and environment instills the concept of a dead and dying world. There is a lot of emphasis on cityscapes and a general movement from urban to natural environments. The game certainly looks quite nice.
Overall, The End is Nigh is a great addition to the precision platformer genre alongside games like Super Meat Boy and They Bleed Pixels. It doesn’t strictly follow either formula. It forges its own path by incorporating more rush mechanics the require quick and precise movements out of the player. While the narrative is lacking, that didn’t hurt the game all too much, although it would have made the experience all the more unique if the narrative had been stronger. If you like difficult platforming, The End is Nigh will definitely give you that fix.
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