There a No Armadillos in This Game (PC)

Having a typo right in your title is a hard first impression to recover from, especially when that title was already trying to be quirky with its strangeness. Between the bad grammar and the unusual name, I actually wasn’t sure There a No Armadillos in This Game was even a real game, but we wouldn’t be here talking about it if it wasn’t one.

Instead, There a No Armadillos in This Game just seems to be a low effort title where not even the smallest amount of proofreading went into the project. The developer seems to put out many low effort games for cheap to try and snag customers, but despite having the typo in the title, There a No Armadillos in This Game actually tries to be a proper game, albeit a small one. There are definitely other errors to be found similar to the typo in the title, including a rather funny option screen that says “There a No Options in This Game”, although having no options is not really something to celebrate. The Steam achievements also feature some errors, mainly that two that make reference to the absent armadillos share a similar, seemingly accidental word swap. “No Amarillos Yet” and “Nope, No Amarillos” are achievements for making a certain amount of progress in the game, and the weird part about the specific typo is that “Amarillo” is the Spanish word for yellow. Perhaps some sort of autocorrect issue occurred and Spanish is the developer’s native language, thus explaining the other grammar problems. It is also quite likely the developer is just messing around with deliberately bad grammar, but considering the fact a mild amount of effort was put into the game’s design, that theory is not as plausible as it might initially seem.

If you’re coming to There a No Armadillos in This Game for a train wreck, you will be disappointed. What you’re getting when you play is a puzzle platformer with a pretty straightforward premise: your character is a ball that is always rolling and you need to jump at the right time to beat levels. The inspiration for the game’s intended title likely comes from this idea, as you would think an armadillo rolled up into a ball would be a good fit as the protagonist for such an adventure. Whether the title is a joke about early development ideas or something else, the truth is there truly are no armadillos in this game. Instead, you play as the large rolling heads of a few different creatures like a rhino, a penguin, and a bear.

The animals are a bit arbitrary in selection, but the game has you go from one to the next as the adventure continues, each animal essentially tasked with clearing a world and then handing things off to the next creature. The first three animals don’t have any special abilities, all jumping and rolling in the same manner, but the snake head has levels that have far lower gravity, making every jump go higher and last longer. The different animals all face different challenges in their stages at least, and some creativity is put into diversifying them at least. The bear starts things off and gets simple levels where you’re mostly jumping on blocks or over spikes to learn the ropes, and the rhino later on has levels littered with saws and is tasked with pressing buttons to make progression blocking gates disappear. There are enough ideas here that the stages never settle into a generic design or rehash concepts too much, but that’s not always a good thing. The snake’s levels feature enemies that really strain how the puzzle solving works, but that is mostly because of how the gameplay concept featured in There a No Armadillos in This Game is implemented.

Most levels in this title take place in one box-shaped room filled with whatever trials you need to overcome for that stage. The goal of a stage is to pick up every orange jewel to make the exit appear, and one problem that is immediately apparent is that the exit door that you need to guide your character towards does not reveal itself until you’ve collected the last jewel. Since you are automatically moving at all times, you can possibly be committed to a roll that seemed safe until the exit appears behind you or in an odd nook, meaning that levels with moving parts like saws or falling icicles can now make reaching that door whose location you could not know impossible. In general, moving around levels is already annoying because of the constant movement. There is an understandable challenge built into the idea, but levels like the ones with saws can require you to stall your rolling head for quite a while so you can make your move during very small windows of safety. The game doesn’t take too long to complete on the whole, but that’s because a lot of the levels swing between so easy they barely require thought and tedious stages where you have to constantly bounce off walls until things are arranged in a way where you can safely get to the gems. Death just means a restart of that stage, but since the whole game is about waiting on your rolling head to get in position, waiting on patterns isn’t very interactive and only requires a good eye for when to make your move.

This is why the snake head’s levels are as bad as they are. While saws move in clearly indicated patterns in a consistent manner, the snake’s low gravity levels have actual creatures who react to your positions, and they do so inconsistently. The pink slimes are the main offenders, because depending on the level and their position, they will jump with entirely different timing than other slimes you’ve encountered. They also react to your ball’s position, so even after you’ve likely died learning which of the slimes you need to worry about and which aren’t going to jump yet, they can then jump towards you or decide to keep along the path they were on. The floating cycloptic balls are a bit more dependable in behavior, always slowly floating towards your animal even if the speed seems to change based on their size. However, the fact they are drifting around the air based on your location leads to some poorly conceived levels where you need to exact your very slight influence over their movement and get the enemies positioned just so that your jump can slip by them. This process will be achieved just like how you learned which slimes will jump: with repeated deaths caused by the necessary trial and error approach. There are some less egregious moments like this in earlier levels, such as rolling across falling icicles potentially screwing you over if you make the wrong ones fall or having saws near where you enter the level so you die immediately if you don’t press the jump button at the right moment. The snake’s levels are the worst about it though because of their slow speed, inconsistencies, and ever shifting variables.

Each of the four animals has a different aesthetic for their levels, and while the bear’s is plain grassland and the penguin has the expected arctic level, the snake’s rather bad levels actually have the most interesting backdrop. The rhino gets a rather boring stone aesthetic perhaps meant to evoke a castle, but the snake’s stages feel almost ethereal with their purple coloration and large crystals, the enemies that match no real life creature also making it feel like you’ve reached some alien location. It’s just a visual touch, but it does make the game’s final level interesting where you play as each animal once in a short gauntlet that strings together the level types, each with their associated hazards to overcome. The gems in this level show you the exact points you need to hit to be successful, but the timing of your jumps is still not so straightforward that you can robotically finish the stage based on the cues. This ends up being perhaps the best level because its challenge comes from outrunning danger over a big linear string of obstacles rather than stalling for time to hope you get a pattern right or lured an enemy into a spot where they won’t be a problem. It’s not really an exhilarating finale so much as one of the moments where the game is neither so easy it’s bland nor frustrating due to tedious movement requirements. Very few other levels stand out in even a mildly positive way unless you count “over quickly” as a compliment, but the final level does show some hope for the concepts that were squandered elsewhere.

Luckily, the game is mostly free of glitches despite typographical errors, although it seems some unintended exploits can crop up quite easily. All the blocks used as platforms and level geometry seem to have rounded edges that aren’t just for show. Hit them just right and you can roll up onto them, which doesn’t feel like an intentional feature because of its very limited applicability and it mostly sabotaging attempts to just use blocks as a wall to bounce off of. With how much you are required to bounce back and forth during your automatic movement, having something that can upset that on rare occasions can be upsetting, but if you can use those rounded edges to your advantage, you might eke out one rare case where a puzzle room solution can be improvised. Most stages, due to their small size and limited amount of objects, are going to be solved pretty much as the developer intended, the path often deadly to deviate from once you figure it out. This is understandable in the easy stages, but even in the late game you’ll have to make sure your interaction with enemies is the one intended way to overcome them or there is no hope for you. You just do not have the level of influence over the world or your character to come up with some creative workarounds besides the rare exploit you might luck into discovering like the corner hop.

THE VERDICT: With a name like There a No Armadillos in This Game, it would actually be a shame if this was some sort of hidden gem. Rather than an unusual title with a typo leading to some interesting puzzle platformer being passed over, what most people are actually missing out on is a rather plain idea done poorly. The automatic rolling too frequently brushes up against variables like enemies who can’t be consistently predicted until you’ve died to them repeatedly or boring but necessary stalling as objects move into place. When there isn’t a problem with a level, it is often a rather plain concept being featured and the level passes by without leaving an impression, so despite a somewhat solid final stage, There a No Armadillos in This Game offers an amount of enjoyable moments equal to its amount of featured armadillos.

And so, I give There a No Armadillos in This Game for PC…

A BAD rating. The final gauntlet level is a good proof of concept for something that could have been made from the automatic rolling idea featured in There a No Armadillos in This Game’s stages, but even it telegraphs your actions too much to really give this game something solid to stand on. Instead, a lot of it is forgettable mediocrity as your skills aren’t really tested or you quickly learn what went wrong and fix it when you immediately replay the stage. But when this game does do something that stands out, it’s for a bad reason. The enemies in the snake levels who behave differently shouldn’t just be the same type of slime enemy, and the floating eyes aren’t an awful idea but one done poorly because of the precision it asks from your imprecise control method. Making the game mostly a series of small puzzle rooms is what hurts it, as the levels that feature decent gimmicks are too short for them to really make their mark and the ones with bad gimmicks are memorable because you have to do something like bounce back and forth off walls for a few seconds to have things move into place so you can actually beat the stage.

The biggest issue certainly comes down to the fact that no matter the level, there’s barely any satisfaction in getting your animal ball to the exit door. It doesn’t feel like the levels are meant to make you think because most hazards and variables of any difficulty come down to timing puzzles you’ll learn to overcome through retrying it over and over until things line up properly. It’s not an interesting enough failure to match its strange name and grammar problems, so There a No Armadillos in This Game really fails to find a niche. The gameplay unfortunately ends up a lot like the game’s title, defined more by its mistakes than what it was trying to do.