Spikes Tend to Kill You

At least in video games they do, anyways. Spikes Tend to Kill you is an extremely difficult platformer by noxious hamster. The setup is simple enough, you are but a lowly square, who wants to get from one side of the room to the other. However, the spikes and shooters littered about the levels are there to put a stop to all your advancement nonsense, and about 95% of the time, they are the winners.

Its definitely got some great level design, all the levels are made to fit perfectly with the jump speed, height, and player speed. Although every level is linear, figuring out and beating the gimmicks in each level still presents some challenge. The game seems to have an obsession with pixel perfect jump accuracy and timing down to the milliseconds in the later levels, with spikes scattered in a formation that only barely gives you enough lateral and longitudinal leeway to survive, and unlike a game like I wanna be the guy, these spikes actually have a Square hitbox, so the empty space around a spike isn't exactly safe either. The shooters are far worse than the spikes though, as the shooter puzzles tend to involve you first figuring out the exact pattern in which you are supposed to take, then failing 20 times because you were a few milliseconds off. If you like games like super meat boy, give up robot, and I wanna be the guy, I'm sure you can wrangle some excitement out of this game.

That's not to say that the game isn't without its problems. A huge element of almost every masochism game like this is that of the stick and carrot. This game has hundreds of sticks, but no carrot. No story to be seen, no promise of a reward, no working towards rescuing a princess who seems to get captured every 5 minutes, not even a death counter, just spikes, shooters, and a midi file that gets grating after about 15 minutes. On the technical side, this game eats up 120% core usage and doubles my ram usage for firefox, which is pretty bad for a flash game. Another notable problem is that about every 30-90 seconds, the game will freeze up on you and ignore input for about 3 seconds. If you were standing still during this time, you continue standing still, if you were moving, you continue moving that direction until the lock up has dissipated. As bad as it sounds, it doesn't effect game play much, but when it does, it can be rage inducing.

All in all its a pretty good game design-wise, its just a shame the author didn't bother to at least attempt tack on a story, or some type of goal above getting to the next room.