Pepper Grinder is a Devolver Digital platforming title that took the world by storm (slightly) when it released on Nintendo Switch and PC earlier this year. The game has now finally come out on current Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and I’ve spent the last week battling through the game on Xbox Series X.
On paper, Pepper Grinder sounded like exactly my kind of game: it’s a tale of revenge, where a woman uses a grinder (aka large drill with a larger step drill bit) to travel through a pixel art world filled with colourful coins and creatures to reclaim her treasure.
It’s a platformer with superb music and lots of hidden areas. There’s a small number of levels (around 20), you need precision and practice to nail the levels, and each feels delightfully different while still being familiar. There’s also an unusual take on traversal, because you barely spend any time actually jumping, and more grinding through various dirt and ice to soar.
So, I was surprised when I spent most of my play through trying to work out why I wasn’t having a good time on Xbox. I’d played some of the game earlier in the year on PC via the ROG Ally and enjoyed it. Why would the same game on Xbox not be a similarly good time?
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Why Pepper Grinder Is Mostly Good
For the most part, the game is absolutely excellent. Moving around via a drill is a novel approach to traversal, and mastering it takes precision (which is a blessing and a curse). Drill traversal isn’t exactly new per se, but it’s unusual to see it harnessed as the main way to getting around, and it’s just nice to occasionally shoot up in the air and then land down to put a step drill bit in some dickhead’s face.
The villains have a distinctive art style, which I greatly enjoy. They have the same energy as children’s TV show The Trap Door. Little angry green narlings, and other creatures that want you dead in various ways.
There might not be eleventeen thousand levels (there are only four worlds with around five levels each), but the game packs a lot of replay value in. There are hidden big to find, stickers to collect, and trying to nail the time trial challenges on Xbox will require super human willpower and resolve. For those that gel with the way the game plays, there is a lot of value here.
What I enjoy most about Pepper Grinder, though, is the music. This is the best indie game original soundtrack I’ve heard in a long, long time. While there have been levels where my failed attempts have dragged on so long that I’ve ended up muting the TV, the part of each level that I look forward to most is getting to hear a new song.
The variety is delightful, going from swing, to drum n bass, to RnB, to rock, reggae, dance and a general lo-fi aura that I can see myself listening to deliberately long after I’ve forgotten the game. Really, all the elements for an incredible, classic game are there.
Then why didn’t I have fun?
I really love platforming games where you have to try again and again to nail different sections to achieve goals. There is beauty in repetition, and it’s through repetition that success is found. This is my wheelhouse. But when it comes to games that require me to try again and again because health is limited or whatever, it’s important that I feel that I am the problem. The controls need to be precise and satisfying, making it so that the only barrier is my skill, which I have the power to improve.
On PC, I found the controls to feel good, I felt that I was in control. But that wasn’t the case on Xbox. On Xbox more often than not I would die or fail a run in ways that felt like it was the fault of imprecise or unsatisfying controls, rather than anything specific I could fix. I don’t mind being bad at a good game, but I do deeply mind when both the game and I are bad at a potentially good game, because I’m not fully in control of what needs to happen to improve.
At that point, a difficult game stops feeling like a challenge I can conquer, and more like something I regret agreeing to do for work. I was mostly playing Pepper Grinder while holding my infant daughter, and while battling the first boss (pictured below, who was about 50 times harder than the second boss for no apparent reason), she heard so many new swear words. So much so, that the baby’s first words are probably going to be “**** you ****ing ****, why won’t you ****ing die”, and that’s not going to be a great look at kindergarten.
It was at the point where I wondered whether my controller was dying – it wouldn’t be the first time I had an Xbox controller let me down mid-review. I tried three controllers. It wasn’t the controller. Is it simply that the controls have less tolerance on Xbox, allowing for much smaller margins of error? Am I just really bad at it? Does it not gel with the way I play? Is movement through the drilling sections supposed to be slightly unpredictable?
Either way, there were long sections where it crossed over from simply being difficult, to feeling like it wasn’t respecting the time of the player. It stopped being fun hard, and drifted into the territory where, if I didn’t have to keep playing it for review, I think I probably would have put it down for a couple of weeks until I was ready to come back.
OK, but with that in mind, would I recommend it?
Pepper Grinder is a great game, I just deeply hated the experience of playing it on Xbox. On PC, it felt great. I’ve heard very good things about it on Switch. Your experience might vary, you might like the extra grinding frustration of the Xbox experience. Whether you play it or not, though, you should seek out the soundtrack and listen to it, and then look at all of the art, because it is an experience to be savoured.
Three-and-a-half stars: ★★★½
Pepper Grinder
Platform(s): PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Ahr Ech
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release Date: 7 August 2024 (for Xbox/PlayStation), 28 March 2024 (for PC, Switch)
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