I should eventually rename this feature "3D platformers, adventure games, RPGs, and explormers" (or some punchier equivalent) because that's pretty much all I'm interested in covering. I'll expand the menu occasionally if something highly acclaimed or otherwise noteworthy appears in my lesser-explored genres, but for the most part I have my creature comforts and I could probably be of more service catering to those with specific tastes that align with my own. Speaking of acquired tastes, this week we have Hell Pie from Sluggerfly: a scatological 3D platformer about collecting the ingredients to cook the worst pie to ever exist for a certain Dark Lord's birthday. The player is Nate: a low-level demon employee of Sin Inc. whose day job involves "bad taste" and the propagation thereof. Accidentally dragooned into Satan's birthday planning, he is assigned to the kitchens and given a list of items to pursue both in Hell and on the no-less-nightmarish surface world.

As with any 3D collectathon platformer there's some leeway in the pursuit of your goals: you will (probably) have to collect all the ingredients eventually, but you can open up new worlds to visit without necessarily having exhausted the previous ones. If an item proves too challenging to acquire, or you simply can't figure out how to reach it yet, it's best to head to the next world and maybe avail yourself of some handy new upgrades. Hell Pie actually has two upgrade trees: the first comes from sacrificing some ridiculously cute "unilambs" to acquire new devil horns, each providing a beneficial effect that might open some doors metaphorically or literally (in the case of the ram horns). The other involves your pet cupid, Nugget, who follows you around on a chain like a garrulous helium balloon. Nugget is primarily used for combat—Nate swings him around into enemies—but he also has enough strength to hold you in the air for a while, allowing you to swing to greater heights. In fact, with the addition of a vertical wall-run, a double-jump, an air dash, and an upgradeable number of Nugget swings you start to be able to cover some serious distance in the air, not only extending where you can go but how quickly you can get anywhere. The platforming doesn't always feel great—platforms can have curved edges so you just slide off if not perfectly on top of them, and the vertical wall-run can be pernickety about activating unless the wall is perfectly flat—and the "extreme close up"-happy camera is about as cursed as it tends to be in games of this genre, even in 2022, but you can't say it isn't fair with the number of options it gives you to stay airborne.

The game is impressively expansive. There's four open-world hubs, five if you count Nate's place of business, but each is massive with multiple "sub-levels" that are a bit more linear and gauntlet-like in their platforming and combat challenges. In addition to the ingredients there's also at least four other collectibles: new outfits for Nate and Nugget, an ubiquitous purple crystal currency that is also spent on costumes, "candymeat" tins that contribute to Nugget's skill tree, the aforementioned unilambs which contribute to Nate's, and some gold maneko nekos that unlock new parts of Sin Inc. to visit. The crystals regenerate endlessly, whether you leave a level and come back or happen to die and get sent back to a checkpoint (dying also costs you some crystals, but the amount becomes negligible quick), and since they're immaterial to making progress you can usually feel free to ignore them except maybe as a guide for where to head next. This currency can be acquired by destroying larger crystal structures too, which are worth something like 150 each: these are what are really worth pursuing, less so the individual rocks. On the one hand I do feel a pang of annoyance that after sweeping up collectibles they all suddenly come back if I fall in the lava or something equally fatal, but maybe it's for the best these purple doodads aren't part of the main collectible hunt: the game might start peaking into Donkey Kong 64 territory otherwise, and I don't think anyone wants that.

Can't say I'm gelling with the game's subversive sense of humor much. It's not full-on Postal or anything, but it does have a lot of poop jokes and the usual snide cynicism that concerns us sinful humans and the many self-destructive methods in which our behavior might drag our souls down to Gehenna. Nugget also never shuts up; I guess the idea is to make him an annoying mouthpiece companion in much the same way Navi was so we don't feel too broken up when he (presumably) needs to get sacrificed at the end of the game (Nate's a mute protagonist, so Nugget tends to provide most of the flavor text for any new area). Sub-levels have included a delightful trip down the sewers where a civil war has broken out between sapient feces and the bald, naked, fleshy humanoids that eat same; an automated slaughterhouse where the meat is "organically" farmed from sedated (and also naked) humans; a Scarface parody with a Tony Montana snailperson fighting off extremely high and extremely agitated geckos; and Hell's own supermarket, where every product gets moved to a different shelf every evening. It's crude, gross, sometimes scathing about humanity's ugly foibles, but generally benign in terms of how "offensive" it's trying to be, instead luxuriating in bad taste like a John Waters movie. It's not been a deterrent for me so far, but it's not a draw either.

Hell Pie is scratching a similar itch, if to an understandably lesser degree, that Super Mario Odyssey did. It's an exceptionally vast game with plenty of content to pursue and many treasures kept in real out-of-the-way places exclusive to those truly proficient in its traversal mechanics. I've been playing for some six or seven hours and am only in the second world, having spent far too long scouring the previous for remote collectibles (the golden cats are by far the hardest to find since they're pretty small and don't make noises unlike the unilambs; my hope is that a late-game power-up will give me some idea where to look for them). The challenge level is sometimes unfair due to the slightly wonky platforming but it checkpoints regularly and there's no real penalty for dying. A dyed-in-the-wool 3D platformer collectathon like this is still a fairly rare and precious thing, Indie sector or no, so for that and for having a bedrock of platforming competency in what is never the easiest genre to pull off with a small team I'm giving Hell Pie a tentative recommend and I fully intend to keep chipping away at it. Man, if I never have to fight another sapient poop wearing a Nazi hat I'll be as golden as these cats I keep (not) finding.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Happy to discover that the level design remained inventive throughout and the challenge level continued to rise at a manageable incline. There were still plenty of times where the gameplay feel wasn't quite there, especially when using Nugget to swing when you were near a platform since he'd often just smack into it and drop you down a pit for no reason, and some collision stuff regarding platforms and enemies alike felt decidedly dubious but I don't think it overall hampered such an expansive and creative 3D platformer, especially when there are so few of them on the ground (or in the air, as was often the case here). Soundtrack was quite something too, but not always a positive something: reminded me of that Hell Yeah! game (also based in Hell) for how much of its silly, subversive personality came via the music.