The End is Nigh

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

The End is Nigh is a challenging Platformer from Edmund McMillen, the creator of Super Meat Boy, and as such it shares a lot in common with Super Meat Boy – the high challenge level, the cartoony art style, and a dark sense of humor, to name a few. This game has players taking the role of Ash, a small black blobby thing that seems to be a rare survivor of an apocalyptic event, as he ventures out of his home and quests to find a friend.

The presentation here is undoubtedly one of this game’s biggest selling points, with a style and sense of humor sure to appeal to players who enjoyed Super Meat Boy and McMillen’s other smash hit, The Binding of Isaac, this time with an oddly chipper protagonist despite the nasty situation he finds himself in (to give you an idea, in the opening, he muses about finding a friend to get into a tooth-spitting contest and collect tumors with). However, while this humor and the cartoony art style is still appealing, the desaturated visuals suck much of the life out of this game, and while the voiced narration is good, on balance I’d say I prefer the presentation of McMillen’s other games.

The gameplay also, while having familiar notes of the same sort of level design we saw in Super Meat Boy, is also not quite on the level with it. This is largely because Ash simply isn’t as capable as Meat Boy was, with his only moves being to jump and ledge-hang. There’s little sense of the same sort of joyful physics that made Super Meat Boy so thrilling to play. At the very least, the level design here is still clever and puts it above many games in the genre, but with it sharing so much in common with Super Meat Boy, it’s hard not to see it as an inferior product.

In the end, if you enjoyed Super Meat Boy, you’ll probably also like The End is Nigh, although it isn’t nearly as good as Super Meat Boy. The level design is still very good and marks this as an overall solid Platformer, but the desaturated visuals and less enjoyable physics keep this game from reaching the same heights as its predecessor.

tl;dr – The End is Nigh is a challenging Platformer where players take the role of an oddly optimistic survivor of the apocalypse who journeys into the wasteland to find a friend. The level design here is very good and the gameplay is decent, but this game lacks the fun physics and color of its predecessor, Super Meat Boy

Grade: B-

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