Two games turned my head this year, the full 360° Exorcist head turn. Both were unexpected and surprising delights.
The first of these was a puzzle platformer laced with narcotics for the secret-hunter’s brain. It’s a game that barges into your life without invite, pulls you into a frenzied, intense affair for a couple of days, then vanishes into the night leaving you wanting more. It has a beautifully simple hook, but this masks more depth than many of its platforming sisters.
It was Leap Year (Daniel Linssen, 2024). But please don’t jump for joy – you’re likely to die when you hit the ground.
Leap Year presents itself as a one-note platformer: here be a game where a normal jump will kill you. Over the course of the first few rooms, which feel more brutal than anything I would really call a tutorial, the player learns that only jumping up a slope or step is safe, because a leap across level ground will take in enough height for the resulting fall to break your legs. Far too many times, you’ll jab the jump button and send your character on a one-way parabolic flight of death.
Rushing will kill the average gamer, but Groundhog Death coaxes players into being reckless. The design has been scuffed to give it the sort of intentional friction you get in Dark Souls or Getting Over It. The thing is most of it isn’t very difficult, but simply counterintuitive, hostile to platforming muscle memory. The skills you developed for a hardcore platformer like VVVVVV are tossed into the garbage disposal here and made into wormfood, because jumping just doesn’t work the way you’re used to. Checkpoints are liberally distributed but, be warned, there are plenty of occasions you can find yourself swearing at the screen. I have to do this parkour shit again?
It’s also full of comedy. The first room dangles the 29th day over your head just out of reach. Another early room is impossible to cross because you can’t leap over some spikes to an altar without smashing every bone in your body.
And you think this is it. Collect the ‘dates’ of the month of February with a mixture of cautious jumps and fine nudges. But why are there symbols everywhere? Why do largely empty rooms seem to have some purpose in their architecture?
Before we move on to the obligatory spoiler section, here’s the bit I did for Leap Year on my last Thinky Games stream.
TO THE VICTOR, THE SPOILERS
Leap Year is a bit Outer Wilds. Once you figure certain things out, you can’t have that experience again, that joy of discovery. It’s better to think of Leap Year as a mystery game where you, the famous mechanics detective, must figure out what makes this game tick. And once you’ve solved the mystery, there’s no going back. (Except for the speedrunners. That’s not me, bub.)
The small, lo-fi world of Leap Year is dressed with diagrams and glyphs. Every secret is on the critical path. You don’t necessarily need to resolve every mysterious sign to make progress – they are just a helping hand, after all – but they do point towards secrets you must uncover.
For example, one of the secrets happily highlights you’ve missed out the secret passage that leads to the drill room. Indeed, I hadn’t spotted that on the original way through. You don’t necessarily need to understand all of the signs in Leap Year; I never quite grasped the spiral symbol. But I don’t think there’s a single optional secret in Leap Year– oh… yes there is according to this map of Leap Year I just found on Steam. Well, then.
But Leap Year’s biggest secret is that falling triggers superpowers and it’s a secret because the game gaslights you into believing you’re a fragile little cookie. Perhaps Fall Year is a more appropriate name for the game, although that ain’t nowhere near as cool.
The fact there are only three superpower fall states keeps the average player genuinely surprised as each one is revealed. There’s a room at the top of the map designed to reveal the first power because you’re thrust into a trap which sets you up for an impossible jump. Normally, your little avatar is white, but then after falling just an inch, they turn red and red is the colour of death. But in this room, you fall further than expected and turn purple. Purple means you will bounce off the ground as if it is a trampoline.
This logical, uh, leap is not necessarily quick for everyone. I didn’t get how the purple bounce worked for a little while. I remember something weird happened in the top room but didn’t figure immediately that it was because I’d fallen far enough. And it works very much like the ordinary jump – if you purple bounce off the floor, the resulting arc isn’t high enough to give you a second purple bounce, so you can easily purple bounce into death.
And to most players it won’t even occur that there’s more to find beyond the purple and so it is the job of the drill room to back the player onto a ledge again, to ask them to take another, uh, leap of faith. There’s a drop in the drill room which is just deep enough to slip through purple into… blue.
The blue superpower is a shock. It is the last thing any of us might expect because it feels so gamebreaking. Fall far enough and you become a one-person drill who can drill indefinitely through dirt, rock and metal. Through anything in fact. But as soon as your avatar pops out of that sea of dirt, rock or metal, the drilling ceases – so you’d better hope it isn’t a long drop to ground…
Discovering the purple bounce unlocks parts of the map that were seemingly unreachable. The blue drill highlights new exits that you didn’t even realise existed. Can you drill off the bottom of this screen into another? What about this one? And this one?
But Leap Year drives you inexorably to the calendar room which only opens once you’ve collected 28 days of February. And what do you discover on the other side of that unlocked door?
A hole over a big drop.
It seemed like the blue superpower was so powerful there would be nothing beyond it. But there is. Of course there is. Beyond blue there is yellow. You fall, hit the ground and… fall again upwards. What black magic is this?
It’s the classic gravity flip. And, my God, it feels like you have been witness to the ultimate metroidvania. Purple gave you access to inaccessible areas. Blue broke the boundaries of the map and then yellow… yellow transformed the world. Hidden in plain sight is a completely different game, the upside-down world, which explains why the ceilings in many rooms seemed weirdly precise. I was blown away by how ludicrously well–designed it was.
The journey you then undertake is long and somewhat arduous, where you follow vertical chevron symbols to your final destination. You know exactly where this is headed: back to the start of the game, to close the circle.
And then you, a being that now walks on the ceiling, can finally snatch the 29th day, which has taunted you from the very first moment of play.
A cutscene plays in which the February page of a calendar is torn away to reveal March – and the game rolls the credits. Fuck me, I would have played a second Leap Year world looking for another 31 dates in a hot second.
This bite-sized beauty. My friends. Gaming does not get much better than this.
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> The first of these was a puzzle platformer laced with narcotics for the secret-hunter’s brain.
Was what made me want to buy it.
> Leap Year presents itself as a one-note platformer: here be a game where a normal jump will kill you.
Here I stopped reading and bought it. I’ll be back when I play it for ab it.
But also, at the start of the article you mention two games but I see only one mentioned in the article?
Nice. If we’re lucky, the second game will be next week.
I’ve been on a little bit of a kick of running Windows games in Wineskin so I bought this but my attempt to try this didn’t work. Might work if I update my OS but not sure what else that might break. So it’s later for me on this one.
(Also have been playing some of the beta of part II of Bonfire Peaks Lost Memories which feels like opening my presents early.)
A real shame Leap Year didn’t work for you 🙁 You’re playing Part II of Bonfire Peaks Lost Memories in beta?!? I have no words.
Well there’s still hope for me for Leap Year. It may be that I just have to change the way I use Wineskin, which after a little searching is a simple matter of making sense of comments like
“Next I decided to take a chance on the reddit advice:
brew install –formula gcenx/wine/winetricks\
brew install –cask –no-quarantine gcenx/wine/wine-crossover\
That creates /Applications/Wine.app which when launched opens a Terminal with a modified path. Trying to use wine there complains that wine64 is not in the path. But find … -print | grep -i wine64 shows that it is located in the second item on $path.”
(When I say I’m on a kick of using Wineskin, I mean I’m playing one thing that launches in Java and should be trivial to get working on a Mac but I gave up. And Cave Story, which used to work on a Mac but was culled in the 32-bit purge.)
The BPLM2 beta is open! I just joined the beta branch on steam, or something like that. Corey sent me a very nice note (as my people say) about a bug I found.
@matt w – Leap Year works fine on Steam Deck (whether because of a native Linux build or due to Steam’s Proton I don’t know) so there should be hope!
SPOILERS GALORE FOR LEAP YEAR BEGINS HERE
SERIOUSLY DON’T READ IF YOU HAVENT FINISHED THE GAME
@Joel That was fun! It was much shorter than I expected but I’d rather be left wanting more than struggle playing a game I don’t want to play any more but are forced to by my inner demons.
I completely missed the beauty of the ceilings until the reveal but I am amazed by the level design and how there are a bunch of places where you can purple-poing before being taught it but you’re dis-incentivized from doing that. I did accidentally find blue-drilling when… There is this room just right of the 28-day gate where you drop down onto a person and there is a corridor leading to the gate room. I killed the guy, made a loop without dying and wanted to see if I can poing into those corridors only to drill through the floor.
I also almost figured out the spikes earlier than expected but the place where I tried to do it was impossible and I assumed there’s something else to it.
If there is one thing I’d complain about is the linearity – sure, there is some small branching here and there but the game forces you to collect all 28 days before you can collect the last one and I think the final cherry on top for the game’s metroidbrainia-ness would be making the gate knowledge based and a knowledge you only learn by getting all the days. (I don’t want to think how it could be done)
I think I’ll try to do the routing myself and go for the 15 minute achievement, that’s how cool I am!
SPOILERS GALORE FOR LEAP YEAR ENDS HERE
nothing to add, just glad you played it! i did the week it was released, and what a lovely and surprising time. i love manganore
@Daniel
Just for you, I will spoil that we played Daniel Linssen’s Super Super Super Super for the upcoming Side by Side series, picked because we loved Leap Year that much.
// AND NOW FOR THE REAL SPOILER BIT //
@Maurycy
I’m glad you got a lot out of it. I love that it’s short but incredibly rich. I understand from the speedrunners there are a few shortcuts in there which is where you can accidentally discover what you can do.
I guess it’s a fair point about the linearity but I can’t say it bothered me all the much as there is just one literal gate in the game.
Joel something is wrong with the mobile version of the site. The bg is black instead of white, the tex in the inputs is black as well so I had to switch to desktop version to type this comment.
Now for the game – I did two runs yesterday before bed. One before I discovered the timer option netted me the 30 minute achievement.
The second I did in 15 minutes 3 seconds…….
Anywah I did mo routing and no prep, I think it’s super doable wven if you’re a more of a casual player so if you’re looking for an excuse to play a bit more of this game :).
Also when you go fast the way you constantly have to fight your instincts is just
As for my complaint – i don’t seriously consider it a real issue. It was more of a case of “if I am forced to find something to complain about then here is one thing”.
When Outer Wilds was mentioned, I stopped reading and went to buy the game. It already was on my radar, but that was what pushed me.
SPOILERS SPOILERS
I agree that it’s a masterclass in pacing your discoveries – compact but great in making you comfortable with each “state” before gently pushing you to discovering another “state”. I also misunderstood the blue thing – thinking it was limited to the drill before seeing the writing on the walls of the left end of the ice biome, that specifically represents how many blocks you must fall for each state. I also sorta spoiled myself of the yellow state – there’s a part in the underside of the map, under the ice biome where you can fall out of the world, and if you jump you fall juuust enough to glimpse the yellow state before dying. I spent a few minutes there, trying to do something with that (I thought initially it had to be some kind of double jump/flight) before giving up.
I guess the only thing that’s a bit underutilised is the grid. I’m not the quickest person to catch on to puzzles, but once I discovered each state I was never in doubt if a jump to purple/blue was possible: the layout of the map is very good at communicating it visually without resorting to the grid. I’m curious to check out speedruns – maybe there’s more places to “sequence break” (if even this concept makes sense for Leap Year) that you can discover with the grid.
I really liked it overall, and I don’t mind the linearity – I’m sure there’s a ton of little optimisations you can do, but for a first playthrough I really enjoyed the pacing, more than a lot of other “metroidbrainias”. And, again, perfect lenght for what it is. It might be up there with Animal Well and Tactical Breach Wizards as a favourite of this year. Thanks, Joel!
@Lorenzo I’ll jump in straight to the spoilers.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
You should totally check the speedruns as there is ampt opportunity to sequence break. This is actually the first game other than Metroid Fusion that I am tempted to speedrun myself.
I myself had a lot of trouble judging when and where I can do purple and blue but also had a problem using the grid so I just, erm, lived with all the deaths.
But really, it’s a great game.
Such a good game. Funnily enough, that YouTube embed here must be the first time I heard the game’s music, since I was lucky enough to betatest it before any sound was implemented.
David! I haven’t forgotten about your email mentioning Outer Wilds. I just thought it had to be said.
Haha of course I had no recollection of that email, but thank you for mentioning it. I just found and read it. I was so frustrated with Jon Blow back then.
A guy in my friend group has been playing Echoes of the Eye on Discord for the rest of the group’s viewing pleasure. I think I’d probably enjoy a good Leap Year playthrough as well.