The Dredge of Seventeen - my 2017-focused blog project for the previous year - is now done and dusted and mostly unread, and yet I find myself with a hard-drive full of smaller 2017 games that I couldn't quite get around to in time. That's going to be a mini-theme of sorts for the Indie Game of the Week for the foreseeable future; I'm almost hoping I don't find anything worthwhile since that'll mean a strong desire to re-re-adjust this GOTY list despite an already rigorous re-ranking of the year's best. Sadly for me, MagiCat might prove to be a dark horse (black cat?) contender.

The first hour or so with MagiCat doesn't convey the greatest first impression. The game's one major flaw is in how sticky its controls can be, especially when crouching, and those are obviously at the forefront right when you start. The first world, since this is a traditional 2D stage-based platformer we're talking about, has to be simple in order to ease the player in so there's a certain degree of going through the motions and that ennui isn't helped by the game's relatively basic (if cute), pedestrian pixel art style that uses some very small sprites in large environments that can make the latter feel empty. However, the game's mediocrity slowly gives way to a remarkable display of imagination and ambition as it dawns on the player that every stage they've played so far has had its own special mechanic, none of which have yet to be repeated. Given the game has 63 stages total (seven "worlds" with nine stages apiece) that's an impressive amount of coding work for an Indie required to implementing a new mechanic every stage. Many are, of course, those seen several times before: buttons that activate walls and deactivate others, moving platforms that the player controls with switches, the infamous Mega Man blocks that phase in and out in sequence - the game balances old ideas with new ones, but with each stage it's always something fresh and they're just long enough to find an adequate number of iterations of the concept before it's ready to move on. Of note also is that every single one of the game's stages ends with a boss fight, which presents one last challenge for that stage's related gimmick.

More so than just this mechanical variation, the game dabbles with explormer elements but not in the usual traversal upgrade sense. Instead, the player spends a specific collectible currency - the rubies, of which there are always three in a stage and are usually the hardest to reach - to obtain permanent passive skills and active buffs. These skills, rather than allow the player to surpass otherwise impassable stage barriers, instead offer various conveniences to make the game easier to handle. One of the earliest is a heal move that the player can invoke with a different collectible, magic potions, to make the boss fights far more manageable provided they bring enough magic with them into the battle. Others include a power-up to eliminate deaths from falling (you lose health instead, of which you have four pips), magnetizing collectibles to draw them in from further away, or prolonging the period of invincibility after getting hit.

Even the parts of the game which feel regimented and formulaic have some intelligent purpose behind their inclusion. An example of this in action is how every stage is built the same way: three "sections," each of which starts with a checkpoint (besides the first) and ends with a transition to the next, containing several puzzles and exactly one of the stage's three ruby collectibles. The rubies are arranged in your UI so you know which section's ruby you might be missing, a helpful by-product of this immutable set-up. Likewise, while the checkpoints need valuable magic potions to activate, the quantity of them means you rarely have to repeat too much of the game's content and can safely reset back to one if you miss the ruby in that same section (some require a very specific chain of actions and can be easily made impossible to reach if you mess up) or other items. Last, the game will save any rubies you picked up even if you should die before reaching the next checkpoint - it might not count towards the score for that run, but does for the sake of game progression and related achievements.

That sense of generosity is geared towards helping less skilled players progress through the game, while at the same time sticking asterisks next to all their completion results for the sake of those tough guys that are in it for a challenge and aghast at the idea of compromises of any sort: for instance, if you use a dash to collect one of the rubies, which can make reaching them easier especially when you've upgraded the dash to go up as well, the game eliminates the bonus you would've received otherwise and marks the ruby with a green tick instead of a golden one. Likewise, the player receives a blue star for defeating the boss without using the merciful "revive" feature and a green one if they can defeat them without taking a single hit. There's no apparent gain and therefore appreciable difference to these differently-colored accolades beyond bragging rights, but they're there for the more skilled players to show off with or work towards (along with the game's time trials) while the rest of us plebs can complete the game at our own pace with whatever boons we wish to use. It's a subtle but clever approach to a malleable, player-determinant difficulty setting.

The game's third collectible type are pawprint icons earned through highscores, and thus where many of the above bonuses start to pull their weight. This resource is not only used for reviving from death mid-stage, if you wanted to simply brute force all the bosses and tougher platforming challenges, but also for modifying the overworld map. The overworld map first appears like any other - you can follow the paths to new stages, and completing them removes a barricade or fixes a bridge that allows you access to subsequent ones - but certain upgrades allow you to permanently place walkway blocks or demolish obstacles, no longer requiring the nearby stage to open the way for you. With both of these upgrades and enough resources from earning highscores (which also means you can't just skip all the stages and make a beeline to the end) you can play the game's worlds and their stages in any order you choose. Some of the later worlds actually require you craft your own path to them, connecting islands in the right spot to move onto what turn out to be optional areas. The world map is also filled with secrets - there are rubies hidden in specific destructible overworld objects and there's a series of hidden magic "ponds" that can change the protagonist's color palette - so it's a little more dynamic than the traditional 16-bit platformer map screens it otherwise homages.

While I have been fairly effusive so far, there's the original matter that the gameplay is mostly perfunctory, with the aforementioned odd stickiness with the crouching. The jumping feels fine but occasionally the hard limit to its maximum distance feels designed to be a pixel short of some hops, which leads to some irritating "wait, can I actually reach it or not?" testing the waters. Some stage gimmicks are more tolerable than others, though on the whole the variation is a good thing if only because it means you'll only suffer the bad cases once. I also suffered severe and apparently random slowdown and the occasional input lag; it's most notable in stages with weather effects or other showy background animations as well as on the world map, where slowdown doesn't matter quite so much. In the default windowed mode the game's FPS counter is included in the titlebar and I can regularly see it dip from 60fps to 20 or 30 and back again. If I had a better idea of what causes this sudden lurching that would help, as it can be a real nuisance in boss fights particularly to have it suddenly whiplash back to full speed in an instant. This, of course, may entirely be my own circumstances at work and not applicable to most PCs which I imagine can run a dinky 16-bit platformer throwback just fine.

On the whole, though, MagiCat completely upended my expectations after enough time with it and I've grown more attached to its charms while conversely growing more frustrated at its tougher late-game challenges. I've completed the first five worlds now and dipped my toes into the last two - the seventh world has some real trippy nightmare visuals going on; it reminds me of that Eversion game from a little while back - and I'm taking full advantage of the mid-boss fight heals when I was hesitant to do so earlier for game balance reasons. Many of the puzzle surrounding the rubies are now taking many attempts apiece (and there's at least one I cannot figure out how to reach at all, so I'll be circling back before I'm done). I talked about this in a recent review for StarBoy, a much shorter platformer that was built around a single gimmick, that you only see games like Super Mario Bros. (especially SMB3 and its successors) capable of throwing out a new idea or set of mechanics every stage given the amount of talent and budget behind each one, so to see that same mechanical diversity in friggin' MagiCat, a cute game about a magical cat that can fire little kitty spells, is astounding. I can only hope they left enough ideas for an eventual sequel.

Ranking: 4 out of 5. (So far.)