There's no mystery to what N++ is or what it's aiming to achieve. The sequel to one of the early masocore platformers, N+, which was itself a sequel to an ancient free flash game that gave me frequent consternation, N, N++ refines the minimalist ninja platformer even further, maintaining the precise fluidity of its controls and physics as it posits ever more challenging single-stage scenarios for foolhardy players to throw themselves at over and over. The masocore platformer genre shot to new heights with the advent of Super Meat Boy - another nigh-impossible platformer buoyed by platforming controls so well-tuned that it was rare that a death ever felt like the game's fault and not your own, and another game that began life as a free flash game on an aggregate portal website - but it's really games like N++ and Flywrench (which I covered here) that really encapsulate what the genre is: by reducing the amount of graphics and fancy effects to almost ascetic levels, the game can not only focus purely on gameplay without anything aesthetically elaborate causing a distraction but also ensures that the game runs a perfect 60 frames per second regardless of your set-up, even in cases like mine where my PC situation hovers between "sad" and "Grave of the Fireflies depressing".

What's significant about the gameplay of N++, and this is very quickly hammered into you, is how important momentum and air control is to the flow of the game. Your ninja requires a bit of space to start running, and then it becomes difficult to slow him down. Momentum is carried into jumps, especially wall jumps, and by hitting ramps and walls at high speed you can leap off to even greater heights through a process I'm not sure is entirely copacetic with the established laws of motion. It is a very precise and challenging game at the best of times, but getting a handle on its particular quirks as they relate to motion and inertia adds an extra wrinkle that - admittedly - starts to fade once it becomes second-nature. Even so, there are times where a tiny amount of forward momentum can make a huge amount of difference in the distance you're able to cover with one leap, and that precision can serve to trip you up more often than not.

Each level is predicated on hitting a button and then leaving through the newly opened exit. Having two targets to aim for gives the level designer ample opportunity to squash you (or cut you, or burn you, or explode you) both on the way to the switch and on the way back to the door. In addition, each stage is packed with golden squares: these serve as an optional - or, if you're a collect-a-thon nut like me, mandatory - objective in each stage, and almost always increases the difficulty several times over. N++ is particularly fond of hiding objects behind gold bricks as well, such as buttons that activate impassable doors or inert mines that become deadly once toggled. Each stage also has a time limit, but I was either dead or through the door long before it could tick down to zero, so I never did find out if running out of time killed you or simply eliminated a time-based bonus to your overall score - like many games of this level of difficulty, the game frequently checks your progress against those of your friends and others playing online for bragging rights.

Then there's the sheer size of the game to consider. N++ is gigantic. I guess the bright side to such graphically simple stages is that you can keep churning them out until you eventually run out of level design ideas. Each "episode" is comprised of five stages played consecutively, and completing whole rows of these episodes unlock extras from different color palettes for the game's GUI to additional Strider-esque flowing scarves and color combos for the anonymous ninja hero. To give you a sense of how big the game actually is, the tutorial alone has twenty-five episodes. That's 125 levels total, just for the introductory portion of the game that's dripfeeding you the game's basic and advanced platforming mechanics and its various hazard and obstacle types. It's merely an aperitif for the game's main course of 100 episodes (500 stages), plus another 100 episodes based on - I presume by the title "Legacy" - the previous game N+. It'd be one thing if these levels were short; while they're all single-screen, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be in and out within seconds. Some stages require such a prohibitively high level of precision that you'll be painstakingly slow in your progress, and that's in a best case scenario where you aren't getting constantly creamed by a thousand different ninja-killing devices. If you're aiming for the gold bricks, that'll usually mean going out of your way to reach them, often accomplishing some additional level of challenge in the process. I might spend anywhere between ten seconds and ten minutes on a stage depending on its layout and difficulty, and the game has over a thousand of the damn things.

I made the wise if cowardly executive decision to stop after the tutorial levels. My reasoning is thus: the tutorials introduce all of the game's features, at least one would assume, and it wasn't exactly a walk in the park despite its nature as a learning aid. In fact, if it wasn't killing me on the reg, I might suggest that it was doing a poor frickin' job preparing me for the rest of the game. Couple that with the fact that it's still a substantial 125 stages of variable challenge, during which I managed to nearly master its floaty physics and the application of ramps and walls for additional vertical or horizontal movement, and I'd say I have a fairly decent grasp already of what N++ is all about without subjecting myself to the Sisyphean torment of its later levels. Call it another case of me chickening out, like quitting midway through my travails with Mercury back when I reviewed Flywrench, but my eternal love of platformers is always sorely tested by games such as N++ that, if I didn't know better, I would swear does all it can to scientifically determine where a player's skill limit (or patience) eventually terminates and surreptitiously ships that data off to NASA for astronaut research.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (for the tutorial levels)

Man, I really liked N++ a lot. I was a fan of the original N back in the day, but I think this second sequel really rounded out the entire package. It's such a huge game as you point out, and I worked my way through a darn good number of levels, and never got tired of it. Just became a time issue, but part of me would love to go back and try and beat my head against those later, harder levels some more. I also really like how they expanded the multiplayer (both co-op and competitive) and level creation parts of the package.

Anyway, I think this was a game that was sorely overlooked at the time. It may be simple, but for challenging platformers, I'm hard-pressed to think of many better ones. I think it just controls super tightly, has so much content, and I even like its look and style a lot.