Spinchs at PAX Online X EGX DigitalDeveloper: Queen Bee GamesPublisher: Akapura GamesPlatform: Demo on PCAvailability: Out now on Switch, PC, Mac
There’s a strange familiarity to the art of Spinch, a twisting, mesmerizing little indie platformer. It reminds me of people I know and knew, and their phenomenal but often wasted, underused, or underappreciated talent. It reminds me of drawn curtains, musty dark-green sofas, neon yellow lighters and early era Spotify ads at four in the morning. It reminds me of YouTube binges, of university, and before that college. It reminds me of friends, basically, fictional and real, and the kind of art they’d make as they spiralled in and out of the highs and lows of their life.
Spinch has a sensational sense of vibe. It’s a simple, almost rudimentary platformer at its core: you can run, jump, and dash, and you have that kind of sticky grippiness to walls when you hit them mid air, and that’s kind of it. It’s incredibly close to classic Mario Bros. games, precise, frantic and agile, with a little overworld and levels called 1-1 and a boss at the end of each section. Where it differs is style, opting for literal psychedelia over the sort of implied, psychedelic-adjacency of Mario and the gang.