Sigi – A Fart for Melusina (Switch)
Despite what you might think, there are in fact no typos in the title of this article’s subject, as it is indeed a review of a game called Sigi – A Fart for Melusina. Naturally, a game with such a name happily features flatulent humor, but it actually is a bit less indulgent than one might expect. Admittedly, the game’s main character will let out a toot at the end of every level and tells a few mild jokes along the way, but the farts don’t really feature all that prominently during the course of play, making it easy for people uninterested in it to let it slide while children might get a chuckle from the lighthearted but not oppressive prevalence of passing gas.
Perhaps the most meaningful use of the fart is in its role as a plot point. Sigi leaves his house one night as he hears some beautiful singing, finding a gorgeous mermaid named Melusina singing by the water. While he is immediately smitten, the pot-bellied knight’s diet of fast food leads to him letting out a fart that causes the mermaid to flee. Chasing after her to try and win her heart despite his initial faux pas, Sigi finds a world populated with monsters stands in his way, the quest now being to save Melusina rather than just find her. Sigi – A Fart for Melusina isn’t very shy about making its influences obvious, the pixel art, monstrous creatures in your path, and attack method of firing blades hearkening back to the Ghosts n’ Goblins series while the simple and approachable difficulty and utilitarian level design being more akin to Mario’s method of platform game design.
Levels in Sigi – A Fart for Melusina aim to challenge your jumping skill and use of whatever weapon you’re currently equipped with, stage design presenting mild challenges to both. Hopping around a level is usually about getting over dangerous pits or spikes, outrunning falling platforms, and encountering monsters that you’ll need to dispatch, but unlike its Ghosts n’ Goblins inspiration, the game is fairly forgiving and friendly, making it actually a pretty good platformer for younger players. You can have up to three hearts to let you weather three hits before dying at which point you’ll be set back to one of the fairly common checkpoints in the level, and scattered around stages are plenty of Sigi’s favorite unhealthy foods to restore life if he does take a hit. There are ways to instantly die like falling down pits, and you probably don’t want to get too sloppy against certain enemies like the ghosts you can’t kill, crows that poop on your head for damage, or the spitting plants, so the game doesn’t completely roll over and let you beat its levels without putting in some effort. In fact, the game has a tendency to cluster together enemies and traps to try and get you to slip up, but you’re never really expected to do more than just understand the jumping and fire your weapon when appropriate.
The weapons in Sigi – A Fart for Melusina come in a few flavors, Sigi carrying one at a time and swapping whenever he picks up a symbol with a new weapon type on it. Starting off with a simple and effective sword that he can fire forward infinitely, Sigi is meant to fight from afar even though the game makes sure the screen real estate and your firing rate allow the enemies the chance to attack you if approached poorly. The sword is simple but effective, and the other weapons you can use are almost always at least as useful as it, although the weapon that lets you hurl fried chicken seems a touch weaker. Sigi can get other attacks such as firing multiple daggers at once to cover more space as well as axes and what I’m going to go ahead and guess are metal bolas that are fired in arcs, each of them strong enough that it never hurts to accidentally pick up the symbol and be made to use them. Not much is asked of the attacks so they do what they need to, only the boss fights really asking you to do more than position yourself well and strike. The bosses certainly aren’t complicated either though, basically cycles of vulnerability where you strike when you can and then aim to survive against foes that are a bit more capable than the zombies and spiders usually running forward hoping to bump into you.
Sigi – A Fart for Melusina doesn’t really do much in total. The game is definitely small, composed of only 20 stages and while the game does gradually add new enemies, platform types, and traps to the mix, the world doesn’t really change much. You’re almost always going to be running over grassy ground with trees in the background, the sky changing from day to night but the levels not having stark identities or major gimmicks to set them apart. This is where the earlier Mario comparison is most apt, and while Mario games will include varied worlds, they often do feature a generic theme for early areas that serve the purpose of gameplay over visual appeal. Sigi – A Fart for Melusina feels more like the first world of a larger title, the game’s levels short as well making for an experience that can take less than an hour to complete, but nothing ever really hurts the play in that small span of time. Bosses are simple and easy to understand, the levels ask for some platforming prowess and awareness but aren’t too difficult and make earning extra lives easy enough… really, Sigi – A Fart for Melusina’s juvenile fart focus is perhaps the best indicator that this is a fairly good fit for children.
Despite being accessible and short, there are extra tasks you can complete to make things a bit more involved for an older gamer. The game encourages you to not only beat it as quickly as possible, but there is a percentage of completion you see on the end screen that ties into certain secrets you can find along the way. While you can collect coins to earn an extra life, each level also features floating letters for you to collect, the player needing to collect S, I, G, and a second I in each stage for the sake of completion, earning a life for the trouble as well. There are also hidden caves behind breakable walls in every stage save the boss battles, these places not only containing plenty of coins to collect but serving as slightly harder platforming challenges that might also contain the S-I-G-I letters or even the game’s hidden artifacts. Hidden somewhere in the twenty stages are a few secret artifacts that also bump up your percentage points, but none of these extra tasks have any true reward save for offering something more to do and the satisfaction of full completion. Still, having something to always look out for keeps you more involved, and for an already brisk experience, that at least keeps its simplicity from becoming complete shallowness.
THE VERDICT: Simple and silly, there’s not a whole lot of meat on Sigi – A Fart of Melusina’s bones despite its portly protagonist, but its small amount of content would make for a decent start to a larger title. What we do still have is a much kinder Ghosts n’ Goblins game that would be decent fun for younger audiences and has a bit of extra stuff to do for older players who won’t struggle much with some competent but admittedly basic level designs. The flatulence isn’t present enough to put off certain types of players, but the amount of goofiness it does indulge in adds the slightest dash of character to a pretty standard platforming experience that probably wouldn’t stand out otherwise.
And so, I give Sigi – A Fart for Melusina for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. It could be said that any time you go into a game it begins as Okay and it either rises or falls based on its merits, but Sigi – A Fart for Melusina just didn’t stick around long enough to push it in either direction. On the one hand, that ensures that its simple play fills its short amount of time with just enough to make the platforming decent, but even with its extra content, it still won’t rise above the starting position. However, there really isn’t much room for many issues either, with perhaps the boss fights only really having the space or complexity to rub a player the wrong way, and they’re still pretty tame save the final boss who is also an inexplicable but fun reference. It’s quick and easy and its gameplay works properly, with only really the subjectivity of the fart jokes to possibly put it below or maybe even above its competent construction.
As much as I’ve drawn attention to it for its strangeness, perhaps the title does more for the game than you might think. A title like Sigi – A Fart for Melusina sets your expectations quite well. It’s a silly little game, one kids might like, but it’s not really trying to be some big, sprawling adventure. It’s a plucky platformer that’s here to make you smile for a while, it just needed more time or a denser package if it did want to be more than that.