A couple years back, I took on a fairly intense challenge to play through as many games released in 2017 as I could to pad out what was an already beefy GOTY list into one with a hundred items on it: a testament to the exceptional output of that year (and one that has not been matched since, though 2023 is certainly making a strong push for that crown). While planning that feature, Splasher was on my list of reserves to look into only if I ran out of other games: it didn't look bad but the footage I saw gave me distinct vibes of one of those reflex-intensive masocore platformers, i.e. a Super Meat Boy or a Celeste. After last year, my interest in Splasher rose considerably once I'd played the next game by its developers, Splashteam, which was the excellent Pikmin-like Tinykin. To my chagrin, Splasher turned out to be a great deal of fun and now I've gotta figure out where to squeeze it into that monolithic top 100 list at some point down the road.

In Splasher, you play as a nameless janitorial grunt at Inkorp: an Aperture Science-like corporation dealing largely in goop with various properties. You discover accidentally that the cigar-chomping CEO of the company has been experimenting on your fellow underpaid hazmat workers and are forced to revolt in order to stay alive. The game has you moving from stage by stage, optionally aiming for all the collectibles (your fellow imperiled workers, whom can also die if you're not careful) and/or a time trial target. Splasher's movement is very fluid (as it were) and based around a lot of momentum and inertia to a similar extent as the N family of ninja platformers. This emphasis on physics comes to a head when the game starts introducing the three main liquids you'll be working with: red is sticky and allows you to traverse walls and ceilings once covered, though it'll slow you down if it's on the floor; yellow is very bouncy, allowing you to reach new heights or make longer horizontal jumps; and blue is simply water, used to clean away the others and short-circuit any robotic foes you might bump into. As the game progresses, you become able to spray all three of these fluids an infinite amount to create your own path forward, quickly alternating types as required—all three are attached to various face buttons, with the last face button activating your standard jump.

Despite the complexity of having all these chemicals on hand to tinker with and the game's general breakneck pace, its difficulty is pleasingly on the fair side. Even if you're rescuing all your fellow workers at every opportunity, which occasionally means jumping into portals linked to single-screen "quarantine zone" challenge rooms, it's not until the game's final handful of levels that I really started to break a sweat trying to execute on the right series of jumps and sprays to make it to the end in one piece. I'd say about the time the game introduces the last of the three chemicals (the bouncy yellow) that it starts getting markedly more difficult and matches the masocores previously mentioned in the number of deaths you might incur at any one place, though by then the difficulty curve has thoroughly prepared you for the travails to come.

I will say a lot of that difficulty comes from the mental exercise of remembering which chemical is bound to which button and not mixing them up when the shit's in the process of hitting the fan, perhaps because it's one of those levels where the water level is rising and you're forced to quickly react to every unseen trap and jumping sequence perfectly, but otherwise the game is checkpointed well and is accommodating enough with regards to air control and establishing an intuitive level of understanding how far a jump might go depending on current conditions. So an example of that would be the distance gained from a standing jump, a running jump, a wall jump if you're aiming upwards, a wall jump if you're aiming horizontally, and any of the above when combined with the red or yellow chemical. "Gamefeel" is absolutely instrumental for a platformer like this that moves so fast that playing it becomes almost an instinctual thing, or at least muscle memory, while simultaneously always being the hardest aspect to get right when creating a platformer of this type given it's mostly a process of trial-and-error experimentation for the designers. Spending days and months trying to find that Goldilocks zone is a process I'm all too familiar with and certainly one I don't envy others having to pin down.

It's clear Splashteam knew precisely what they were doing with this game, having exhaustively studied the likes of Super Meat Boy and N++ to find the right combination of platforming tricks and hazard-laden level design to create a game that never slows down, never wavers in finding new challenges for the player, and never raises its challenge level too harshly when it comes time to turn the screws to keep players from getting too complacent with their skills. Given they then took that keen expertise and design insight and turned out an equally competent and professional 3D platformer in Tinykin comes to no real surprise, retroactively speaking. Splashteam is two-for-two as far as I'm concerned and I'm eagerly anticipating their next game, while deeply curious about the platformer archetype they'll attempt to master next.

Rating: 5 out of 5. (Though that nightmare of a final gauntlet did tempt me to drop the score out of sheer frustration...)