Electronic Super Joy (Xbox One)

While Electronic Super Joy might seem like a bit of a vague title when first considered, it actually pretty accurately encapsulates what the game is all about. “Electronic” refers to the thumping electronic soundtrack that works together with the colorful and energetic backgrounds to create a dance club atmosphere. “Super”, while seemingly a generic term, is a word most often found in the titles of platforming games, with Super Meat Boy especially being a clear inspiration for the design of this game. “Joy” might be the hardest to pull meaning from besides the obvious route of saying the game is fun, but a more appropriate interpretation would be just how much fun the developer clearly had with their ideas, from the strange moans of satisfaction you hear when you reach a checkpoint to the boss battle with the Pope in a UFO and even the game’s story being kicked off because a wizard stole the main character’s butt.

Electronic Super Joy is a precision platformer, the simple act of jumping from platform to platform complicated by requiring quick and accurate movement to land correctly and avoid any enemies trying to attack you at the same time. It is expected that you will die many times over the course of a single stage but there are frequent checkpoints so it can be split up into smaller surmountable chunks rather than a gauntlet of difficult maneuvering. The level design ethos usually feels like a good fit for the genre because of this. While at times you will need to learn by failure about what’s coming up, for the most part it is surmountable as long as you move properly, the player just needing the reflexes to keep up with the pace of obstacles as well as a screen that is often pushing you forward, killing you if you can’t outrun the left edge. Speed and skillful reactions are both rewarded here, the levels built to put up a good fight and overcoming them leaving you almost as satisfied as the oddly sensual moans you’d hear when you come back to life after a failure. There is one tiny hitch to fluidly training yourself up on a hard area though, that being the fact your character’s movement can trigger things rather than them being constants. A slight delay in movement can mean an enemy that constantly shoots out deadly projectiles isn’t activated until it appears on screen, so rather than having the expected rhythm, its actions now loop to a new beat. With some homing missiles that get fired your way as well, a slight deviation from steadily progressing your run on a level can lead to dying to an odd change to the level’s pace, something a precision platformer is probably better off avoiding due to their emphasis both on consistent movement skill as well as memorization.

 

Electronic Super Joy does keep its basics pretty simple though to best allow you to hone them over the course of the game. For most of your journey, the only really reliable skill you have is a single jump, but when it’s all you have, its designed to get the job done, is easy to control in the air for adjusting your course, and it can interact with environmental objects like arrows you can bounce off of for height and sticky walls that give it extra purpose rather than always being about simply hopping over all your problems. However, as you progress through the game, the people you meet will give you new abilities and just as quickly take them away, but when these abilities are added, that segment of the game will almost always be about mastering that particular skill. A skill like a double jump might seem like it would make things easier, but levels where it’s available are laid out to require properly timing how you do the double jump to weave around walls or just barely slip into an area. At some points you get even more additional jumps, but then it’s about making them last to clear huge gaps or dodging an incredible amount of aerial danger while using it. The smash is one of the few ways you’ll ever get to attack things, it being an abrupt slam down that can damage anything you land on during it, but it can also be used for some tight platforming, the immediate stopping of your momentum an occasionally useful tool. Since enemies are deadly to the touch and some even shoot lasers or other worries, smashing them can be an instant loss if you’re a bit off with your aim, and if it’s an enemy in a group, killing one can leave you open to immediate defeat from another. Dealing with this is certainly part of the challenge, but having a slightly off rhythm between runs of a same area can have some similar issues here with the changed enemy movements throwing off your trained up precision movement.

Taking away and giving you back your abilities lets Electronic Super Joy change up the level layouts pretty much as it pleases, but despite this being an easy way to inject some new flavor into upcoming levels, it also continues to change around its designs quite often. Areas might involve vertical climbs or mad dashes forward, they might be a sequence of floating sticky walls you need to precisely slide down before jumping off of or an area where platforms are enemies who explode shortly after you touch them. Boss battles are even more of an excuse for new gimmicks rather than really being about fighting a foe, their fights more dependent on the level layout they occur in than the skills of your enemy. While most stages are about the constant push to get to the end though, the boss stages allow for some different designs like needing to position yourself to slam the Pope’s UFO or needing to collect the runes to summon a large beast in an area getting gradually more and more crowded with enemies and lasers. For the main story, Electronic Super Joy remains pretty focused on making sure your simple skills are up to the task before you with gimmicks that test them well. Things like rotating the world are introduced though that perhaps are more disorienting but challenging, but the game keeps things moving forward so once you’re out of the levels that rely on them, you can go back to challenges based on execution rather than realizing your controls didn’t change even when you were viewing the action upside-down.

 

Within these already challenging designs are also some collectible Stars that require some skillful platforming to grab, the player unlocking bonus levels if they grab them all. These bonus levels, however, are bit weak compared to the more focused structure seen in the main stages. This is mainly because these extra levels are far more experimental, and while you can expect some gimmicky stages in the main game, most of the additional stages are focused on briefly flirting with a platforming idea. They’re a somewhat mixed bag, some a good fit for the precision platforming, while others such as a stage that features zones where everything inside them slows down feel incongruent with the rest of the game design without really adding much but brief waiting periods to play. These are, however, optional levels, meant more as a treat for players looking for more after the main experience, but you might be a little hungry after the main experience. Despite having over 40 stages that are fairly difficult, the game is pretty quick to complete save if you get stuck along the way. Many levels do seem to end a bit early, and while seeing the level’s finish can be a relief at times, the level length balance can lead to some level design concepts feeling gone before their time or the opposite, sticking around a touch too long without changing enough.

THE VERDICT: With it’s energetic dance music and silly tone, Electronic Super Joy adds a lot of style to its simple precision platforming design. Having strong beats and bright colors backing up your impressive movement through its challenging level designs certainly makes it feel more satisfying than it otherwise might be. The simple controls and short ability list don’t hold Electronic Super Joy back from having involved stages and gimmicks that fit them, although some inconsistent enemy rhythms can throw off the flow and not every gimmick is a hit. For a platforming challenge focused on testing your movement control though, it’s a good fit with some extra character to make it a fairly thrilling bit of difficult play.

 

And so, I give Electronic Super Joy for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. Electronic Super Joy keeps things moving, levels requiring quick movement befitting the pulsing beat of the EDM backing the action up. Electronic dance music and the colorful backgrounds can make this game seem a bit more than it is at times, the simple gameplay solid but not pushed as far as it could go save in the extra stages that sometimes toy with ideas that feel opposed to what made the rest of the game feel so tightly constructed and rhythmic. Electronic Super Joy is certainly a good precision platformer that knows how to place its respawn points to keep you pushing to get better but still has the challenging level design that makes each checkpoint flag reached and every level completion feel earned. Some areas feel like they end too quickly, but that’s more a sign that it was reeling you in with some engaging platforming challenges and simply shifted away before you had your fill of the concept.

 

A quick, energetic, and challenging game, Electronic Super Joy does a lot and is a joy to play for combining its simple elements so well, but there would still a bit more design work needed before it could really live up to its claim of being a SUPER joy.