Super Sami Roll (PS5)
When I first saw Super Sami Roll, it looked like a cute friendly little 3D platformer with an adorable protagonist who rolls about levels and uses their tongue to pull themselves around. A nostalgic memory of the all too easy Nintendo 64 platformer Chameleon Twist came to mind, but not only did that game focus much more on its tongue mechanic than Super Sami Roll does, Super Sami Roll also cranks up the difficulty to surprisingly high levels, demanding a level of precision and execution after easing you in with a few simple stages. However, while it can take a bit to come to understand the game’s intention and controls, that early period is important to getting you comfortable before the challenge really starts.
Sami is a little dinosaur-like creature the game introduces first with a beautiful professional quality animation before taking an odd shift to presenting its actual cutscenes with detailed pixelated stills. Sami and his flying squirrel friend Vera are relaxing one day when a rich monkey named Albert VII desires some exotic creatures for his collection. Rather than snagging the long tongued rolling dragon creature though, Albert’s machine snags up Vera and Sami rolls after to try and save her, facing off with Albert VII at the end of each world as he tries out a new mech. Sami isn’t really built for fighting though and these boss fights are often a bit of a low point since they’re easier than most of the game and pretty simple and safe, but they usually cap off a gauntlet where the lava rises and you need to platform quickly past many dangers to get to the boss.
The regular level navigation is really Super Sami Roll’s shining feature, and it manages that despite its hero only having a few options to pull from. Rolling around levels is as easy as pointing your control stick around and if you can keep moving for a while you can build up speed to make bigger jumps or just get around levels more quickly, each level having a timer that becomes really tight fairly early on. Beating a level isn’t just about navigating it safely, you need to collect coin chips that float around the level to get small time boosts from each of them, and while you can put it on Relaxed mode to remove the time pressure, that certainly doesn’t rob the game of its challenge. Once you begin to understand how Sami moves you’re prepared for later levels that require you to move him around long thin stretches of land only as wide as Sami is, and even when they curve you will find it is actually quite natural to follow the curve with light stick movements. You’ll need to wrangle you camera as part of movement fairly often, but the game takes a “better safe than sorry” approach to what it displays so it will make objects that could potentially block your view of your forward movement invisible even when it seems like it wouldn’t need to just to ensure you always can pull off the maneuvers you’re attempting.
As you press through levels you’ll find the game even adds in other pressures like rising and falling water and lava waves to keep you moving, and while death is likely a frequent process as you start to feel out a level, checkpoints do exist and restarting from them is a quick and easy process. They give a rather nice short term goal to shoot for too and you can still get a great ranking on a stage even if you continue from the checkpoint, although the rankings seem mostly for feeling good about how quickly you navigated a level. Many stages have a clear path forward and execution of it is the challenge, and once you do manage to get it down it has a satisfying fluid feel as everything clicks into place. You do have some tools to help if things do go awry. Your tongue is used like a grappling hook at times to latch onto things like bars you can swing from, but it plays into the platforming in deeper ways as well. If you snag something with your tongue, even enemies or spikes, as you are pulled towards it you can jump to disengage the tongue and get an upwards boost, this leading to some aerial acrobatics in stages where these are linked together repeatedly in midair. That feature of your tongue also lets you sometimes make your own shortcuts or catch yourself when you missed your landing spot, Sami not only lenient in trying to grab the ledge if he’s close enough to it but the tongue great for pulling you away from a near tumble down into a deadly drop.
With the tongue you can start to find your own way around obstacles, enemies, and even some navigation challenges. Sami has other abilities like a wall jump and a ground pound that launches him higher in the air than a normal jump too, so once you’ve mastered the full set of skills you can start to find ways to jump to areas you were meant to access in different ways or start cutting corners to increase your level navigation speed. Most levels do follow an obstacle course ethos where you are meant to head down a set path to succeed, but they are often open enough to some tricky maneuvers to save time or skip dangers. The demands the early game makes of your movement helps you learn your tools and by the time the difficulty has really become extreme you will find you do feel like you’re properly trained up to handle such skill-intensive platforming challenges.
There are plenty of level gimmicks to be found across the game’s four worlds, and for the most part they are good additions to an ever evolving selections of dangers and enemy mechanics. Timing is definitely a big focus with a lot of areas asking you to identify a swift and safe path around enemies. One interesting thing about Super Sami Roll is the hero is only really killed by things like water, lava, or falling into the abyss. When an enemy hits him, he’ll launch upwards and you’ll have very limited control of him until he’s finished reacting to the pain, meaning that many times even if you do get hurt you might be able to salvage things. Getting damaged while above open air is often a death sentence though, but usually this is a nice bit of leniency despite many levels being timed too tightly to be completed if you get hurt constantly along the way. That small room to account for errors does do wonders for making it easier to retry as you know a few little flubs won’t doom a run unless they’re really bad.
With levels styled like long twisting race tracks, desert levels with sand worms and cobras denying you space if you aren’t quick, giant tunnels with segments spinning in different directions, and plenty of settings within worlds so you aren’t just exploring beaches and snowy climes when that’s the major theme of the area, Super Sami Roll keeps up the visual variety and rolls out new dangers along the way. A few are a little weak, the hot air balloons you bounce on feeling a little off in how you interact with them on occasion and the ghost flames that follow you in thankfully very few stages asking you to constantly keep moving and removing the efficacy of some of your safety net features like tongue saves. There are definitely more hits than misses and many of them slip right into regular play without demanding the kind of slow down to consider them that could ruin the game’s flow. Platforms ahead might electrify in a pattern or raising water levels may briefly deny you platforms, but if you’re snappy about it you can cross it all without breaking pace since the patterns are spaced just so to help you keep momentum.
On top of the main objective of level completion, there’s plenty of extra content to be earned. The coin chips that earn you more time in levels also can be spent on costumes or colors for your adorable hero and most levels have a hidden raspberry or key you can grab to encourage a bit more exploration of stages beyond figuring out how to effectively move through them. Raspberries also go towards unlockable outfit options, but the keys are earned in the secret stages, each world having a few to find by uncovering alternate exits. Clues to these can be bought at the shop and the riddles given are fairly solid in being direct enough to follow but not so straightforward that you’ll find the alternate exit right away. These secret stages push an already challenging game even further too but they all remain within grasp because your movement options are flexible yet not overly complicated.
A more interesting unlockable comes in the form of a multiplayer mode. Racing either with computer opponents or up to four participating players, the multiplayer takes on the form of a marble race that everyone attempts at once, invisible checkpoints along the way making it more achievable for casual players but the dangers still present enough that people will constantly be shattering their little marble trying to pull ahead of the opposition. Sami isn’t present nor are abilities like his stretchy tongue, but for a chaotic bit of competition it actually works quite well even if the other players haven’t taken the time to play the game’s main adventure.
There is some wonderfully effervescent music for many levels in Super Sami Roll as well and some more intense tracks that better match the levels where gimmicks press in tight on you to perform perfectly, but the game experience unfortunately isn’t 100% smooth. One odd issue exists with the music, as there is sometimes a brief moment where the action stutters and it seemingly lines up with the point where the music track loops. Oddly enough, even during the split second pause to everything before it resumes, it never seemed to cause an actual issue in how I played a level, likely because movement often requires holding some direction or button until the right moment where you switch to the next one so a small delay just means you just make your next move a touch later, but it could possibly interfere if you rely on muscle memory more than the visual reactivity required to learn new areas. The tongue’s limits aren’t too easy to perceive, the game illustrating if it can be used to latch onto something with a white line that extends from Sami but it isn’t always present and the window where it will work is sometimes too small to react to. Either a more striking indicator like a red target that would make it easier to use or more leniency in how long you have to snag an object with your tongue would help remove a few moments where the challenge doesn’t benefit from how precise your positioning need to be for using the tongue. There’s also a bit of an issue with the game’s current registration of Trophies, since I managed to get trophies for things like wearing certain combinations of accessories yet it never registered the Trophy for buying my first accessory. These little rough patches are unfortunate, but the gameplay is able to survive even issues like the hitching that seem like they should have a bigger and more negative impact than they actually do. Thus, while some levels definitely require frequent retries as you try to get your movement just right, there’s nothing really unfair or frustrating hanging over it to ruin that learning process.
THE VERDICT: Super Sami Roll is a cute and colorful 3D platformer with a fittingly lively soundtrack, but that inviting appearance hides an incredibly challenging focus on precision movement that the game is actually better for embracing. Mastery of your skills allows for satisfying level clearing and even finding your own ways to overcome obstacles, and the quickness of retrying a tough stage as well as the options to potentially save yourself when you’re hurt or almost fall off keep the high difficulty manageable. A few rough technical issues and gimmicks that could use more polish do threaten it at parts, but mostly the obstacle course-like stages are remarkably well designed to put up a fight and the player feels accomplished once they’ve managed to overcome that trial.
And so, I give Super Sami Roll for PlayStation 5…
A GREAT rating. Definitely a game that gets better and better the deeper you get into its levels, Super Sami Roll’s humble start is just there to help you acclimate to how the hero moves before the game begins to really show its best features. You do have a few things that are a little weak or are a little loose in a usually tight game, I didn’t even mention a weird moment where I kept trying to pull myself up on a specific ledge and every time I did Sami would seemingly get stuck to it before falling back down, but those moments are often contained enough that you can get around them or through them easily enough or you have little back-up options like your flexible movement tricks. The fact that Sami’s tongue and wall jumps are not only great ways to pull yourself out of a bind but also can open up many more platforming opportunities outside of the clear path ahead gives this game some appreciated leniency that prevents it from being a pure execution focused experience. You can beat even tightly timed stages after nearly falling off or hitting an enemy, especially if you use your tricks not only to save yourself but make a quicker path to the owl Owluber that serves as the level goal. Enemies that at first seem like rather plain obstacles who can’t even kill you start to become important features of stages as you need to avoid their patrols and attacks in tighter conditions or need to grapple them with your tongue in a risky but necessary maneuver. Having a surprisingly entertaining multiplayer mode even with many of those special moves removed properly shows the knack for level design that makes this such a solid experience.
Super Sami Roll is still a precision platformer even on its easiest setting, and another technical flub I experienced was the game automatically setting me to Advanced difficulty whenever I restarted the game even though that removes the checkpoints that helps make the high difficulty and tight requirements more manageable. Difficulty can be changed any time and there are no penalties for doing so either it seems besides needing to restart the current level. Super Sami Roll definitely needs a bit more polish, but it luckily put all of the polish it’s already pulled off into the important areas. Not only is this game able to have some excellent background music that captures different moods but it builds stage after stage of well-conceived platforming trials. While its inviting appearance may draw in players who aren’t ready for when the gloves come off, those who do stick with it will find a strong relationship between player movement and level design, beating some of the harder levels having that wonderful moment of excited relief as you finally get everything to work thanks to your own efforts.