Splasher (PC)
If you take one look at Splasher’s art style and its cigar-chomping main villain who will raise his middle finger any chance he gets, it’s easy to think that Splasher has some Newgrounds DNA in it. While games like Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, and Alien Hominid all trace their origins back to the crass irreverence of the flash game website, I can’t find any members of the development team who actually have their game making history trace back to the website their design choices so easily evoke. Instead, their pedigree actually links them back to Ubisoft’s output, the programmer and sound designer both having worked on Rayman Origins previously. Whether or not a true connection exists between this game’s creators and the Newgrounds community, it certainly fits in nicely with them both in its attitude and design directions.
The name Splasher refers to the employees who clean up and help operate Inkorp’s paint factory where strange organic masses that almost look like fleshy potatoes are harvested for the special ink they produce. One Splasher in particular happens to stumble across a back room one day while doing janitorial work and learns the awful truth about these potato sacs, these actually being other workers who were mutated by the evil Docteur. While the game’s hero doesn’t have much to work with, he immediately sets out to save his fellow workers from being harvested for ink, quickly finding new ways that he can use his liquid-fueled splatter cannon to navigate the factory, take down cybernetically enhanced enemies, and hopefully put a stop to the doctor’s terrible work.
The splatter cannon is the main focus of all your platforming action in this side-scrolling adventure. Each new type of fluid you load into it will allow you to coat surfaces in different helpful liquids, it being fairly easy to both switch to the desired substance in an instant and aim it even while running or jumping. Using a controller rather than keyboard controls is certainly recommended so you can angle your cannon’s shot precisely. Your first fluid in the tank is a fairly simple one, water allowing you to clean any surface that has been splattered with the other materials. In the opening levels, the game introduces all the fluids that will eventually be available to you, but kicking things off you’ll have to rely on paint spewing guns in the environment to coat surfaces appropriately. Pink ink will allow the Splasher to grip onto the surface and move across it with ease, wall-crawling and clambering across the ceiling frequently a part of getting around the levels. Yellow ink’s properties allow it to launch anything that touches it, making it perfect for getting a greater amount of height than a regular jump or set up chains of surfaces to bounce off of to get around hazards. The water exists not only to clean up inking errors but can remove deliberately placed ink traps that would mess you up if you don’t wash them away in time, but it is also a good fit for destroying enemies normally since your other fluid types will either coat them in sticky goo to immobilize them or bounce them backwards.
The levels in Splasher are built with a speedrunning mindset, the player encouraged to move quickly because the stages are often conducive to snappy and fluid movement. There are only a few points in the game where quick movement is absolutely required, these being escape sequences following boss battles where you’ll be burnt up by the rising acid if you don’t climb the shafts and surfaces quickly, but it’s fairly easy to find a flow in your movement due to everything working well if you’re quick to react to what you’re seeing. If you do need to slow down you usually can though, this helping for areas where you might want to take down enemies before moving or want to go for some of the extra content. Your jump is a surprisingly good tool for playing either slow or fast, its generous hang time allowing for easy midair adjustment of your momentum or changing the direction you want to fall. It’s also a very important part to keeping the game from being frustrating since your movement and your cannon’s aim are tied to the same joystick. That extra time to point a shot without throwing your movement off is key to a lot of aerial action you’ll need to take to survive and complete some of the game’s tougher sections.
Each level in Splasher features seven workers you can save, your fellow employees not only featuring some of the more interesting fluid-based puzzles and timing challenges to mess with but also some of the weaker gameplay moments. There are little rifts in space you can jump into where you’ll need to defeat a challenge room to save the worker within, and many of these take the shape of some fairly basic combat where you wait for baddies to slowly appear so you can then easily kill them. These do get more complicated and involve dangers like lasers or limited flooring you need to consider, but combat is definitely not Splasher’s forte. When you’re running through a level it’s easy enough to blast a baddie with some ink and keep moving, but waiting on slow battles in these dimensional rifts or facing off with a boss who needs a set amount of time before revealing its weak spot slows down the action even if you’re not trying to rush through the game and offers rather weak content as the reward for cooling your heels. More often the little workers are trapped in some minor puzzle that won’t break up the pacing though, the player instead asked to think a bit more about their actions and maneuvering to grab the worker before moving on.
It is recommended you grab every worker hidden in Splasher’s levels to make it a richer experience, the movement and cannon usage shining more in the moments its tested in these ways, but it’s also key to completing the game. Unlocking certain areas requires you to save a set amount of Splashers, so while you can skip some of them if necessary, the game also does a good job of pointing you towards it best gameplay. Golden fluid is also an important collectible hidden all throughout the level, this being a reward for beating enemies, something that coats surfaces you need to clean up, and a substance hidden inside golden wheels you need to spin with your cannon. Freeing the final worker in a level actually requires you grabbing almost all of the golden ink in the stage, so while there is a little leeway in there being a little extra golden fluid per level, this is just another way Splasher is able to keep you engaged with its level design beyond just finding the fastest way towards the level exit.
Splasher does definitely put the purpose of levels before the visual variety, the game tidily designing locations to play into their gameplay function first and foremost. Everything feels rather tightly honed, the player needing to engage with each of the elements properly or they’ll die and be forced back to a checkpoint. Water jets can propel you upwards but sometimes you’ll need to make sure to get off before you’re launched into something dangerous, platforms you move by spraying water wheels are used as handy navigation tools, and the player can sometimes need to shoot a fleshy switch to even have the platforms they’ll need as they jump into a new area appear. Gimmicks are more often things like lasers becoming the levels main hazard or saws getting introduced to the pool of dangers as they punish you if you don’t leap off an inky surface properly, but the one time the game really tries to have a pronounced shift in how you play, it’s in the annoying wind-focused stages. Slowing down your movement, requiring sticky pink ink to even walk without being pushed back, and other little annoyances weigh down the few stages that feature strong winds. Thankfully Splasher mostly adheres to its idea of shifting around a batch of effective elements to test your ability to slip between danger and properly use your fluids to get around levels where the right action is often clear enough but your movement skill will determine if you succeed or fail.
THE VERDICT: Splasher’s three ink splatter cannon is a smart fit for its focus on speedy gameplay and control over your character’s movements. Not only does his speed and aerial maneuverability do a lot for building up a sense of flow and allowing for satisfying movement, but the ability to cling to walls or bounce off surfaces increase the flexibility and utility of your movement options. Actually fighting with your splatter cannon for more than a second is often not that great and the dimensional rifts lean on that idea a little too hard, but a lot of the employee rescues are interesting little puzzles to break up the game’s focus on skillful maneuvering and speedy action.
And so, I give Slasher for PC…
A GOOD rating. For a game all about utilizing fluids to increase you ability to maneuver around a level, it’s little surprise that Splasher pretty much went all in on the gameplay feeling fluid. Even if you aren’t interested in speedrunning, it’s easy to build up speed and move through a level swiftly, the stage design providing plenty of moments where you can easily integrate whatever danger dodging and fluid placement you need to perform with rapid forward progression. The workers may seem counterintuitive to this with them pulling the player aside to perform an action that can require a bit of thought, but these can be streamed into your fast-paced level navigation as well. Once you’ve come to understand the mechanics at play well enough, you can easily spot the intended solution and only need to nail its execution. That skill-focused play never really gets too difficult while still providing a solid platforming challenge, so the major things holding Splasher back still remain its embrace of things that truly arrest your momentum like the slow-going windy levels or the pocket dimensions where you can be left standing in place waiting to take rather simple actions. The fact that grabbing all the workers despite this is still recommended should show that these brief pace breakers don’t harm the game too much, but the shallow face-offs with enemies or bosses could have certainly found some better way to integrate the satisfying movement mechanics or otherwise remained something you can slip into your flow the same way you can most employee rescues.
Splasher is colorful, weird, and quite wonderful for it, and while it may not have true heritage with a game like Super Meat Boy, it still has that focus on tight movement that made that title such a hit. Splasher’s platforming action can easily survive the small misses in its level design because otherwise it does an excellent job stringing together challenges that test your ability to skillfully navigate a level and identify how to use the level to your advantage. It’s the kind of platformer that’s just a blast to run through with enough substance to some of its challenges to remain fresh. I can easily give this game a thumbs up rather than that middle finger Docteur raises any time he shows up on screen.