Newt One (PC)
While video games are full of nonviolent titles thanks to the existence of genres like the puzzle game, it is still possible to be find a bit of violence even in colorful little platformers like the Super Mario games. Hopping on a Goomba to make it disappear isn’t really that harsh, but there are games that come along and use their nonviolent approach as a selling point, with Newt One definitely being a incredibly colorful game that is aiming to be kid-friendly and pleasant rather than being too demanding when it comes to the required level of platforming prowess.
On the day of Newt’s birthday, his single-horned rhino-like best friend Curno comes with unfortunate news: The Great Slumber has locked the Elders of the land of Groovy Hue away and robbed it of much of its color and music. Newt has no hesitation in immediately heading out to try and rescue the elders and the land, collecting special staves in the forest, glaciers, islands, and clouds to help with the task of restoring everything to as it should be.
As you head into one of the game’s four worlds though, the initial stages will have Newt entering only with his basic jump and his ability to touch grey objects to bring color back to them. Like most any game where you can restore color to the environment, the simple act of taking a dull location and breathing life back into it with your actions has a simple level of satisfaction, and the different areas of the game are happy to embrace their own color palettes to help remind you you’re somewhere new. No matter where you are a major focus is given to very bright shades, pastel and neon fairly common with many objects and plants favoring striped appearances so that touching them brings to life something vivid and colorful. Each level has a certain amount of objects, platforms, and characters you need to restore the color to in order to get 100% on that stage and the music continues to evolve as you return the brightness to it, Newt One having some rather catchy tunes that get a bit more lively as the areas they back spring to life.
Touching every item in a world can be a bit of chore though. The detection involved in making contact can sometimes be a little off so you might need to touch a platform or wall a second time to have it register, plenty of small flowers will be placed in an area and ask for the rather bland and straightforward task of running up to touch each one, and in areas with a lot of moving platforms or stages with more complex rotating objects made up of many tiles you can spend a lot of time waiting so you can touch something and then move on to doing the same with even more tiles. Coloring definitely gets a lot easier in the world when you grab its associated staff, the magic item sending little lines off to fill in most colorless objects in the immediate area. Removing that need to touch every flower is a welcome change even if the staff might sometimes inexplicably skip something and make you wonder why you’ve reached the end of the level with 99%, but it’s definitely better than the alternative of slowly ensuring every item must be touched.
Levels don’t have any enemies to worry about, but on top of coloring everything there are a few optional goals to busy yourself with. Each stage has a parrot chained up somewhere that often requires looking around a bit more closely to find or making a special jump at the right point to reach. Collecting them all unlocks a difficult final level that isn’t very good unfortunately, the awkward jump physics and Newt’s relationship with sloped surfaces and moving objects making it frustrating rather than a neat change of pace. If you can manage to beat a level without falling off the stage and getting teleported back to it by Curno you’ll earn another little badge on the level complete screen, and collecting all the music notes in a stage will let you unlock different colors for your region specific outfits, although the game makes no effort to tell you how many notes are in a stage unfortunately. To get the last badge for a stage you need to beat a level with full color percentage, all the notes, the parrot, and do it all without dying by falling off the edge, and while this isn’t necessary to beat the game, the often sparse levels of Newt One would benefit from having these extra goals if it wasn’t for your fairly bad platforming options.
Newt has a rather annoying aspect to his jump where if you continue to hold the jump button down, the moment he touches the ground he’ll make another jump. This may not seem too bad at first, but in some stages Newt can pick up a pair of wings, and after jumping you need to hold the button to glide. There are many moments Newt One has your glide just barely carry you from one platform to another, and since you’ll be holding the glide button when you land, Newt will jump right after, jeopardizing your safety and potentially leading to an accidental death. There are no lives and Newt One would probably prefer I don’t call them deaths, but I’d also prefer the jump to be more reliable since sometimes it can conversely fail to activate as you move towards the edge of a platform. Slanted surfaces that are sometimes safe to stand on and other times not add to the troubles, and some levels even feature moving platforms with music notes on them that will doom you if you don’t realize they’re going to phase right through some other dangerous tiles if you ride them too long. These simple but hard to anticipate dangers add to the likelihood you won’t be able to beat a level without Curno bailing you out from a drop. Rigidity in your movement and no way to really save yourself if the jump activates in a strange way can make the mild platforming surprisingly frustrating at times, and this isn’t helped much by the drum item.
The drum pickup will cause three small snare drums to orbit around Newt, and by holding down a button, a circular aura will spread out from Newt. This aura, when released, will color in any object inside its reach, in theory at least. Sometimes elevation throws it off even though one of the main features of the drum is it is meant to help you reach high up plants when you can’t jump to them and don’t have a staff. The build-up time for the aura is a little slow, and if you try to activate it too early it just won’t work properly. This can be an issue for your survival as well because the drum becomes your only way to turn water and lava tiles into surfaces you can walk on. Water must be frozen with the drum’s aura, and if you are landing on the tile when it activates sometimes you’ll fall through the ice. Other times you might need to chain jumps or land on a water platform by freezing it quickly, meaning that timing the drum release becomes crucial to not messing up the jumping sequence. Ice will break surprisingly quickly as well so you need to land on ice, build up the next drum aura, and then quickly freeze more water. This process, coupled with Newt’s movement problems, makes the drum a dreaded sight and one that pops up often as it continues to play into the game’s rather rough platforming.
Newt One has a few other ideas in play like regions that can’t be colored in until you find a crystal and break it open and owls that must be found and colored in so they’ll fly off and make platforms, but these aren’t really going to make up for the flaws in the fundamentals. Any idea that could be neat like running through a rotating cylinder or going down the ice world’s slides is always going to run into those control and detection problems. With 24 levels (not counting the special stage) there really isn’t any idea strong enough to justify putting up with the irritating issues in the game’s design. Coupled with plenty of stages where you might just be waiting on slow moving platforms or the challenge derives from having to walk around a rather plain area and making sure you bump every grey object, the pure platforming focus can’t even maintain the simple satisfaction of bringing a darkened world back to life.
THE VERDICT: Newt One features some rather pleasant color usage and the touch of the catchy music growing as you restore color to the world is a good measure of success that almost made it satisfying to explore its levels. However, the actual level design has far less heart put into it, slow moments and the tedious task of touching everything not helped by issues with the jumping, detecting if you’ve made contact with something, and the oddities found in mechanics like the drum’s strange power. Newt One is cute and colorful, but while the whole game is about bringing color back to a slumbering world, that world’s level geometry often lacks the creative spark needed to bring its gameplay to life, a fact not helped by the frequent little irritations its controls inflict upon the experience.
And so, I give Newt One for PC…
A BAD rating. Newt One really wants to be a casual and pleasant experience, and in that regard it could be easy to forgive some of its blander moments or the rather pokey pace of its gameplay. However, while it is trying to be a relaxing game to play where you don’t have to hurt anything, it loses that appeal when it irritates the player by causing them to fall off the level through no fault of their own. The awkward controls and the systems it is meant to engage with can mean seemingly simple jumps must be done far too carefully or you’ll fall short of your destination or accidentally jump again and plummet off the levels that feature far too much open air. Even if you are fine with taking your time to color in everything, the drums and other moments of tight requirements for your success seem a little at odds with the angle of a low pressure game you can relax with. The music and colors are very nice all the same and the simplistic story of Newt and Curno saving the elders can be pleasant, but the action they’re tied to feels unrefined and a poor fit for the game’s stated ethos while being too dull and stilted to enjoy if treated as a regular platformer.
A nonviolent game is a fine enough goal, although it is often presented as something unique and innovative despite not being all that uncommon if you care to look beyond major releases. Newt One could have definitely been a pleasant platformer that players looking for something innocent could get behind if only its gameplay mechanics didn’t let its inviting colors, cute story, and nice music down. If this was meant to be something relaxing and delightful to play, the repeated frustration of falling off the level geometry because of the game’s flawed platforming will certainly prevent that from being the case.