Live. Die. Repeat. These are the words that made up the tagline to Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow, but they aptly describe Mutant Mudds nonetheless. A retro-flavored platformer from the minds of Dementium and Moon Chronicles, Mutant Mudds is a tough-as-nails throwback to games gone by. Needless to say, my first time jumping and shooting with Renegade Kid‘s cruel creation for Wii U left me enthralled, humiliated, but never defeated.
Much like the sci-fi thriller in question, you will die well and die often in Mutant Mudds. You begin as Max, a bespectacled young boy with a jetpack and a gun that looks like he could’ve been a reject from Earthbound. Aliens called Mudds are invading his humble burg and like any good kid, Max’s out for some close encounters with the squishy kind. That entails jumping from platform to platform shooting every Mudd he can find – every brown, oozing one of them at a time.
It’s all that simple and handles exactly how it looks. You run, you jump, you shoot and you do it all with the A or B button in tandem with the left stick or the D-pad. For all intents and purposes, the D-pad offers more accuracy and comfort in the game’s 2D confines and conveniently suits the NES design scheme. The gameplay’s always precise and instantly damning of any judgment calls I made too late.
Reminiscent of A Thousand and One Spikes, Mutant Mudds offers a bonafide 8-bit arcade experience in every discernible way. Renegade Kid’s lively chip-tunes follow you everywhere you jump to your inevitable death and offer a wry to the morbidity of me and Max’s countless failures. At times, it’s hard not to feel trapped in the seeming time-loop of defeat even in the demo’s single level. In what would’ve likely taken any better player a mere five minutes to beat, it took me a good 20 minutes to learn the game’s rhythm. Like the classic arcade tropes of its inspiration, Mutant Mudd is all about building up a certain muscle memory to your hand-eye coordination combined with my whispering to myself, “Don’t. F***. Up.”
While the godsend of the game’s checkpoint system alleviates some of that anxiety, Mutant Mudds maintains a careful balance of challenge and frustration. I would inch ever so close to glimpsing the finish line when, to my dismay, a pit of spikes and “Who put that there?!” moving platform would only send me on my way to another early grave.
Like its 8-bit predecessors of Ninja Gaiden and Ghosts and Goblins, experimenting is key in Mutant Mudds. You and only you are responsible for loss of life and each death is an invitation to picking yourself back up again. Whether this is a confession of my own inabilities or not, my beautiful agony lays some testament to the side-scrolling menace Renegade Kid’s made. It’s all as instantly repayable as is inherent in its design and while I’m not sure the level’s collectible coins serve much more that superficial swag, it’s easy to find yourself getting back in.
Daring, gripping, and brutally uncompromising, Renegade Kid’s made something splendid in Mutant Mudds. As the industry’s renaissance of hard games marches on with the likes of Dark Souls and La Mulana, I’m not sure how Mutant Mudds will stand the test of time. What I do know is that Mutant Mudds is easily one of the hardest demos you can find, much less survive. Why do we fall, dear gamer? So that we can try, try again.
Mutant Mudds is available for digital download on 3DS, i0S, Steam, Windows for PC, Playstation Vita, Playstation 3, and Wii U. You can also download the demo free until 9:59 am PT, June 22nd. Be sure to check out all things Nindie and more E3 coverage as it comes right here at BagoGames.
