"Eat it!" The words escaped my lips like hydrocarbon fleeing the tailpipe of a backfiring car as I finally roared past my friend's high score in one of N++'s viscera-knotting episodes. I'm not saying that proudly. I don't think of myself as a competitive player, except maybe that's wishful thinking when I'm phantom-dueling my compadres with maddeningly high scores in a platformer this insidious and exacting.
It's what N++ does to your head, prompting soft-spoken guys like me to eventually wring my hands around the gamepad as if to vicariously strangle the game design into submission, all the while hurling obscenities at the screen like Charlie Sheen in any given interview. How, I ask each time I clear an episode's five linked levels and juxtapose my score with leaderboards, did so-and-so get that score?
You can find out. This new PlayStation 4 game lets you watch replays of other players' level runs, rolling or rewinding their near-perfect feats at leisure. This is also known as a form of self-torture.
If, like me, you're just joining the party—N++ is a sequel to N+, a Flash game also released for consoles that I missed in 2008—the "N" stands for ninja. That's according to all five sentences of backstory offered about you eluding killer robots to explore geometrically wacko rooms out of sheer curiosity.
The game's title sounds, to my ear, more like the flub a computer neophyte might make if asked to identify a certain object-oriented programming language. But even that kind of works: N++ as object-oriented side-scroller.
Those objects, nearly all of them death traps, include: pink mines that look like sea anemones, red HAL-like sentries with whirling perimeters that cruise slowly toward you with murderous intent, tiny homing missiles with twin-plumed contrails that careen around levels at killer velocities, thickets of homicidal lasers, and chains of tiny blue-green hexagons that require flawless timing to wend your way through.
Also: switches you have to touch to open exit doors, and Pac-Man-like fields of golden dots—these being the only objects that won't kill you.
Gold is your lifeline, as well as the key to reaching an episode's loftiest scores. As ninjas go, you're at the patina-thin end of the gene pool, condemned to 90 seconds of existence, a death sentence you can mitigate in minute increments by snatching precious nubs of gold (at 2 seconds per piece) from abstruse locations. If the clock runs out before you've cleared a level, your ninja—she/he resembles a peewee stick figure with a sloping ASCII dash for a head—explodes in a bloody, squiggly mess.
The ingenious wrinkle involves upward and sideways momentum, built by running left and right or up 45-degree slopes, then leaping nimbly through the air, holding the jump button to max out your arc.
If you want to rebound off a vertical surface, you can use momentum to make that rebound higher and longer. You can also do weird things you shouldn't be able to, like scaling a wall by wall-jumping off and back onto it repeatedly. You can slow your descent by sliding down walls as well, an often necessary maneuver to avoid sadistically situated death traps, or if you're high enough, not go splat.
I've played plenty of crazy-difficult platformers that reduced my hands to arthritic claws and my vocabulary to four-letter soliloquies. Battletoads. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Super Mario Sunshine. N++ trumps them all. It's the Demon's Souls of platformers multiplied by Sisyphus's rock wrapped inside one of the torture traps from Saw.
So I'm not sure it's fair to say I love it, because I'm betting my cortisol levels after an hour or two are off the charts. But I also can't stop coming back to it. And since I can't find anything wrong with it from a design standpoint, that'll have to suffice as recommendation enough.