by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Super Sami Roll
• Developer: Sonzai Games
• Publisher: X PLUS Company Limited
• PC

3D platformers are a genre that even it’s most prominent creators struggle to get right again. It’s not hard to look at the recent big disappointments in the space and see how difficult it is to bring back what people love about the genre, but for a modern audience. 

Super Sami Roll isn’t one of those disappointments. Alongside games like Suzy Cube or Spark the Electric Jester 2, Super Sami Roll is part of the club of games that build their identities from a familiar base, but play with them in smart ways.

Super Sami Roll’s main touchstones are Mario 3D Land, but I recognized shades of Chameleon Twist, Super Monkey Ball and even Sonic Lost World in its design. Sami carries much more momentum than Mario and his cohort, which allows him to pick up real speed and launch himself long distances and chain together jumps. Despite that movement is surprisingly precise, with a good amount of friction keeping you on even very thin platforms, and a good amount of air control.

Complementing this air control are the usual wall jump, ground bounce, and tongue grab. Your tongue is your grappling hook, parachute and climbing gear. The tongue grab is weirdly technical, requiring precise aim and rhythm. Hitting a wall or enemy will pull you right to it, and depending on the timing, allow you to either wall jump or double jump out of it. Learn to chain it and you can exploit it for time saving shortcuts, skipping entire areas of a level at a time. But more likely you’ll be using it mostly to attempt to save yourself from misjudged jumps.

That’s because there are tons of pitfalls and immediate deaths in Super Sami Roll. There’s no health system, so instead hitting enemies or obstacles sends you flying sky high and out of control–think Mario burning his ass on lava and you’ll have a good idea of it. The lack of control wastes your seconds on the timer, which become more precious as the difficulty ramps up. And if getting hit doesn’t immediately send you plummeting, it can send you into a frustrating loop where the lack of control has you dropping down on enemies or obstacles repeatedly, losing control for long periods of time before allowing you to try again.

Alongside this loss of control, strict time limits and precarious level design often end up meaning one mistake can cost you the run in later levels. Without mastering the tongue grapple, you won’t have a lot of leeway to make mistakes or veer slightly off course. Even then you’ll have to be real precise with that recovery, since the often thin platforms only give you a small window to grapple successfully. Thankfully checkpoints are generally forgiving and there’s no lives system to punish you, meaning the game usually gets away with asking you to complete more difficult sequences than its peers. And short levels keep pain points into minor frustrations rather than all consuming ones.

Super Sami Roll is smart where it puts pressure, and is downright satisfying when you can chain its moveset together to nail a sequence or create a shortcut. It gets a lot of mileage simply out of how good it feels to move. Mechanically, it’s easily one of the best 3D platformers of my recent memory. Even as I became frustrated or wished for more leeway on certain jumps, nailing the next sequence kept me returning.

The same can’t be said about the game aesthetically. While it has plenty of charm and one off gags and characters I enjoyed, it never achieves any sense of setting or cohering aesthetic direction. It’s a rote journey of platformer themes: grassy fields, the sea, the lava level, the ice level and the one Orientalist, culture flattening sand world that videogames are stubbornly keeping alive.

Enemies likewise have no universal identity, to tie them together. Plenty have their own charm–like sneaky road cones or the Street Fighter turtles that will straight up ant-air you if you attempt to jump them–while others are a parade of the usual–snakes in jars and tribal shy guy rip offs that feel out of place in every setting.

Super Sami Roll gets so much right that the things it gets wrong stand out more. Digging in minutiae only happens because the game nails it elsewhere. Sure, there’s plenty more I’d have liked to see out of Super Sami Roll, but in terms of bringing joy to the simple act of moving, this is a game that’s earned a place among other modern platformers.