To describe a game as being a non-stop grind from start to finish would be considered a negative in almost any other context, but not in the case of Pepper Grinder. This energetic platforming adventure straps a high-powered drill to your hand and throttles you forward through a series of terrain-churning 2D paths littered with enemies to pummel and challenging platform sections to navigate at speed. It’s lively, fluid, and frequently frantic, and folds in some fun diversions that help each stage stand out, even though a surprisingly short list of levels means that Pepper Grinder is here for a good time rather than a long time.
The setup is simple: a young girl named Pepper washes ashore on a mysterious island crawling with narwhal-like creatures known as the Narlings, gets unceremoniously dropped to the bottom of a cavern, straps on a power drill (and gives it the grooviest of Bruce Campbell-like revs) before riding a wave of mutilation through the monster army and gathering enough gemstones along the way to bedazzle a pair of Beyonce’s boots. From there it never stops feeling great to steer the pint-sized Pepper through sand and soil like a gas-fuelled groundhog, before emerging at an enemy’s feet to give them the spikiest of surprise attacks.
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Pepper Grinder feels highly reminiscent of Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, only with turf in place of surf.“
Yet although it involves carving holes through rock and dirt with a runaway power drill, Pepper Grinder’s momentum-based movement doesn’t exactly break new ground. It actually feels highly reminiscent of Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, only with turf in place of surf; swapping out bodies of water for suspended chunks of earth to form the basis of an adventure that’s less about landing precisely on the top of platforms than it is tunneling straight through them. Still, although it may effectively be an echo of an Ecco, Pepper Grinder successfully stands on its own thanks to the sheer variety of challenges to be found in its stages. In one you might get a literal helping hand between platforms from a friendly giant, while in another you’ll dive drill-first into saltwater sections and tear through the underbelly of heavily-armed Narling attack boats in order to sink them.
Assault and Pepper
In fact, although Pepper Grinder is almost entirely focussed on boring through rock, rarely does it run the risk of becoming boring itself. Not only does it introduce neat new ways to evolve the drill-based thrills, including a grappling hook to swing Pepper from one crumbly corridor to the next or bodies of water to skim along like an overly sharpened stone, but it also occasionally drops in some heavier hardware to consistently change things up. A machine gun attachment introduces captivating bursts of Contra-inspired carnage as you mow down monster mobs swarming from all directions. Meanwhile a hulking, drill-powered mech suit allows you to tear down buildings and stomp enemy skulls in the sort of devastating 2D rampage rarely seen outside of, well, Rampage. These sequences break up the otherwise non-stop subsurface swerving, although they also occasionally create fractures in the framerate, too (at least on PC).
Performance compromises aside, what’s great about these entertaining enhancements is that they’re used sparingly enough to keep them feeling special, and they allow for some nice surprises along the way. I went from grinding to grinning the first time I came upon a Narling piloting a snowmobile and then realised I could punt him out of the driver’s seat and take control of the vehicle myself, not unlike the magic moment several decades ago when I first discovered I could brazenly hijack Lakitu’s cloud in the original Super Mario Bros. Everything benefits from a smartly streamlined control setup built around a couple of face buttons and the right trigger, so it all feels intuitive as you seamlessly shift between boring holes through the earth to blasting bullets through enemies.
While there’s a healthy variety of enemy types to encounter in Pepper Grinder, it’s somewhat deflating that there are only four boss fights to be found, but they’re at least significantly distinct from each other. One involved a close encounter with a bus-sized rhino beetle that scrambled up the walls and along the ceiling, while another challenged me with toppling a towering magmaworm that punched momentum-halting holes in the terrain with its own pair of damaging drill-arms. While they are certainly physically imposing, none of these bosses are particularly tough to take down since their attack and movement patterns are limited and mostly easy to avoid. That is, with the exception of the final boss, whose wide area-of-effect strikes had me riding my luck just as much as Pepper’s power drill as I frequently surfed my way within a pixel’s width of death. As a result, overcoming Pepper Grinder’s hardened final hurdle left me feeling invigorated as I watched the credits finally roll after multiple tension-filled attempts.
It’s a rock-busting blast while it lasts, then, but it must be said that Pepper Grinder is a fairly compact adventure, and it only took me three hours to work my way through the 20-odd levels that make up its four worlds. While it’s true that it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome, I can’t help but feel like it could have done with another couple of zones to plow through – especially since the ones included here are fairly boilerplate for the platforming genre. A snowy ice realm and lava-filled fire zone might be par for the course, but I would have loved to have seen developer Ahr Ech flex its considerably creative talents and conjure up a few other unique environments to house its entertaining style of subterranean surfing.
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As far as replay potential goes, each stage contains five skull coins to collect, typically hidden behind false walls or at the end of particularly tricky platforming sections, and you can spend them at the in-game shop to unlock a bonus level in each world at the cost of 10 coins a piece. These levels are some of Pepper Grinder’s most enjoyable, including a Donkey Kong Country-inspired cannon course that places the emphasis on precise timing as you bisect hovering hordes of enemies carrying spiky shields, and another that forces you to frantically propel yourself skyward through a series of ice clumps cascading down frozen waterfalls.
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Outside of these four bonus levels, though, there’s little of note to spend your hard-earned gems and skull coins on. You can buy bog-standard cosmetics like palette-swapped hair and clothing for Pepper, as well as character stickers and level landscapes that can be arranged in a fairly frivolous sticker book. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in either, I ended up with pockets lined with unspent gems and little incentive to backtrack through stages in search of the skull coins I missed. However, the time attack mode unlocked after beating Pepper Grinder’s campaign did manage to drag me back in for another hour or so, since its medal-based time challenges are surprisingly strict and demand pinpoint power-drilling to earn, and getting into the supreme flow state required to pass them is when Pepper Grinder is at its most exhilarating.
