Spinch (Switch)
The vibrant world of Spinch is absolutely drenched in color, most every piece of the environment containing a few small pieces cycling through a bright rainbow. Waterfalls, discs, machines, even text boxes, everything is brimming with spectrum cycles that make for a psychedelic land that looks colorful and inviting until you learn this abundance of hues is actually deadly.
In the world of Spinch, colour is a living thing, and it is a hungry one at that. While it moves with the unrestrained fluidity one would expect from light, these animated pigments can take on shapes closer to living creatures, albeit ones that look quite unusual since they’re composed of every color rather than just suitable ones. For whatever reason, colour has determined that Spinch are the perfect prey, perhaps because Spinch are completely white meaning they contain every color or because Spinch seem to reproduce in incredibly high numbers. You play as an adult Spinch who simply goes by its species name, your incredibly huge litter of children in jeopardy as colour keeps sucking them up to try and consume them later. Luckily, you have a pink cousin willing to point you towards where the colour’s bosses are, there still hope for the Spinch species if you can take down the colour’s manifestations and get your children back.
Spinch is a side-scrolling platformer, but while levels demand some attention with their trippy stretches of constantly cycling colors, Spinch itself is a fairly plain hero. They can run and jump, they can slide down a wall or leap from it as a means of scaling it, and they have one extra ability in the form of a dash. On the ground, this is just a burst of speed forward, useful when you want to get somewhere quick, but it is just a temporary burst of speed and you’ll need to chain them together when you are trying to outrun something. If you dash in mid-air though, it’s a bit of a second jump, not really gaining you additional height but it does extend how far you can travel horizontally. One of the game world’s does add swimming to the mix for a while, it slow and imprecise and rather annoying for the time you must engage with it, but your movement options early on feel up to the task only for the game seem to struggle at times with keeping up. Spinch has some unusual performance issues, because while it doesn’t look incredibly complicated, perhaps having so many things onscreen shifting colors rapidly leads to the occasional hitches. Spinch can take a few hits and there are chances to heal or even increase your health for the current level only, but a lot of smoothness is robbed by the occasional hitching and when the game constantly wants you dashing around, a delay in reading your intent can lead to unfair injury or death.
Early stages usually won’t punish you too badly for your slip-ups or the ones its performance problems cause. Stages in Spinch usually put forth one big idea and keep it fairly in focus like a level where you’re trying to outrun large rainbow worms, one where you press switches to change the paths of rolling logs, or those water levels where you might see stages where you fight the current or pick the right pipe to progress. Many of the early level ideas do make encore appearances and crank up the difficulty a touch, which does lead to an unfortunate situation when some of its ideas aren’t particularly inspired or are simply tedious. Power Pulse and its sequel level Power Pulse II both feature an enemy who can’t be harmed, a creature that looks a bit like a pill capsule swimming in the air up high. Periodically, the creature will pop open and drop a technicolor nuke on the stage, instantly killing you unless you’re in a shelter. Unfortunately, as you get deeper into these stages, the time it takes to travel safely between shelters grows, to the point where a little slip-up means you probably won’t make it. This in turn leads to you doubling back or waiting in shelters if you want to make sure you have a good cycle, and while Spinch does want to be a precision platformer at times, it also has a huge focus on waiting out patterns. Later levels get more difficult mostly by having you need to slip into the right spot as monsters move in sequence, and if you miss your moment, all you can do is wait it out. Collectible sugar cubes are sometimes a nice way to just skip past trouble, collecting 50 making you briefly invincible so you can plow through pesky level sections, but the overreliance on watching for the only right moments to move does slow things down and makes some level gimmicks weaker for it.
Not every stage is a drag, and checkpoints are placed about to help you keep making incremental progress even as stages start getting tougher. Checkpoints can be spaced out a fair bit in later levels, the game seeming to struggle a bit when it tries to yank the camera back to the checkpoint on respawn, and another technical problem can be annoying in vertical levels where hitting your head on certain ceilings inexplicably teleports you to the ground below where an enemy might be ready to punish you for the game’s poor coding. There are decent stages to be found from time to time where little goes wrong, straightforward tests of your platforming abilities that have you weaving around danger at a good pace, and most stages do a good job of littering in some of the extra considerations beyond reaching the end. Spinch’s cousin can be found in some levels, and should you locate them, you’ll unlock a bonus stage where the cousin will throw their own children down at you. Catch 75% of them and you’ll get a bomb to use on the boss, but the box you’re doing the baby catching in will have some elements to get tripped up on or your cousin might toss dangerous spike balls down on occasion, making it a bit tougher and the bomb well-earned. You can find your own babies isolated in little areas in levels, often requiring a brief extra bit of exploration and maneuvering to collect up to three per stage, and since they’re retained even if you die trying to get them, it’s actually a great way to add an extra goal to make levels more interesting to navigate.
Spinch is already a rough ride for its first five worlds thanks to technical troubles and some poor level concepts, but even as it starts to get more difficult, it feels manageable and you might feel on the fence on how you feel about the game as a whole. Reach world 6 though, and it takes an abrupt, strange, and almost cruel turn in terms of design. Level 6.1 Magnetic Maze is the only regular level in the world before you face the final boss, but Magnetic Maze ends up being a gauntlet that can end up taking you longer to conquer than some of the previous worlds combined. That’s because Magnetic Maze exhibits a huge jump in difficulty, the player needing to perform multiple perfectly quick movements to avoid constant death constantly as they’re pursued by large pink blobs that are lethal to the touch. Some parts of the stage are legitimately interesting challenges, but then much longer stretches see you needing to figure out the exact moments to jump, dash, and wall jump to avoid the instant death blobs that are not only constantly on your heels, but even if you get a lead they’ll artificially speed up so they’re never too far behind. With points where you need to land on incredibly small platforms or you’ll instantly die, few checkpoints, and unreliable elements like the game hitching to potentially throw off a perfect run, I wasn’t surprised to find the world record speedrun of the game even dies multiple times in this stage. It’s a pure execution test but not an entirely reliable one because the blobs aren’t always consistent, but what’s worse about it is this level is the only one in the final world, meaning it crams all the Spinch babies to collect into one stage and even hides them a bit better than usual when you can’t afford to explore.
If Spinch babies were optional, Magnetic Maze would still be egregious but not so insulting. However, when it comes time to fight a world’s boss, you actually use the babies you found as ammunition against them. Every boss fight in the game is fought in the same format. Spinch must press a button to load up all the babies they’ve rescued in the world into a launcher, the bombs from your cousin also available if you earned them. Then, Spinch must run to another button, pressing it to launch babies and bombs out to hurt the boss. The launcher and loader inevitably has you cross paths with a boss leaping about and spitting projectiles, the player needing to identify their windows for movement in another mechanic based on waiting, but find your moment and cross and then try to hit as much as you can before you go back and load them all back in with another button press. Bosses can feel a bit tedious because of the waiting, but the final boss takes things even further as it is another gauntlet that will take a great deal of time to beat and it’s fairly unlikely you’ll have many babies or bombs to use against it. Already the most grueling fight just because of the time it takes and the lack of checkpoints during the battle, the final boss ends up nearly as bad as Magnetic Maze and their relationship with each other makes the last world particularly disheartening and uninviting. Treat the last boss of World 5 as the final one and you’d certainly have a rickety experience but possibly an okay one despite moments like the pair of Power Pulse stages. Adding on the final two challenges though and it starts to feel like Spinch thinks it is a more fluid and responsive game than it actually is, the need for precision not backed up by consistency in its own design.
THE VERDICT: Spinch’s early stages are a bit rough but not totally flawed, the game allowing you to appreciate its colorful psychedelic worlds before it starts ramping up the difficulty. You’ll face a mix of level designs that let you make decent use of your movement abilities but then a few too many that ask for a lot of waiting to find the one moment you can even act, the slow boss battles not helping things along either. Technical problems and hitches in a game that sometimes asks for speed do jeopardize an already precarious balance, but then everything is thrown out in world 6 where the game strains its issues too far with grueling and demanding precision gauntlets. Whatever patience you had for it before is completely exhausted as it makes levels tough but not engaging, a loud low note plummeting Spinch past the point of forgiveness.
And so, I give Spinch for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Spinch overextends in its final world guaranteeing a rough end to an already shaky experience, but with games like Sonic Superstars still feeling enjoyable despite some poor choices with their stretched out final battles, it wasn’t necessarily a death knell. Had Spinch delivered on some compelling stage design before you enter the Magnetic Maze, it would have something clearer to fall back on. However, Spinch’s problems are bubbling under the surface throughout, cropping up from time to time either through true problems like the hitching that leads to lost inputs or poor level design concepts like Power Pulse and an overemphasis on swimming for one world. Spinch has some wins on its belt as well, levels like one where jellyfish are flying through the air in various patterns managing to better mix identifying patterns with constant movement. Hidden babies improve pretty much every level as they often have a small but reasonable trial involved in reaching them. There are levels with some give and wiggle room that still present a good challenge but don’t require pinpoint precision, but Magnetic Maze comes along asking you to perform perfectly while those blobs coming up behind you can be variable because their catch-up mechanic can throw off your understanding of how much time you have to make your time-sensitive leaps. The final boss might have been less of a drag if collecting babies wasn’t also stapled onto an already awful level, but bosses also always feature the game’s uninteresting focus on waiting for your moment to move as well.
Spinch features the colorful geometric art of Jesse Jacobs, it seeming to miss some of the edge or intent found in his other works, but it is rather striking and makes for a few memorable sights. It also feels squandered in some levels where it’s just plastered on bits of scenery, and without the vibrancy, you’re left to ruminate on levels that aren’t bringing too much to the table. Even without the nosedive near the end, Spinch’s platforming feels like it struggles to find a strong direction, stumbling over occasional interesting gimmicks but just as often designing ones that don’t shine or just slow the play down too much. While cleaner controls and performance might have eased some of the issues in those final stages, Spinch’s concepts also needed an overhaul since it wasn’t exactly shining before it overcommitted to obnoxious difficulty at the end.