It’s Only Up from Here
Rage-inducing games have been around for close to a decade. They can be a real challenge to play, and even more entertaining when you hand the controller off to a friend, letting chaos unfold. However, with more and more of these games coming to fruition, it begs the question—should a game be fair? Should games be forgiving to players who don’t want to invest their time into grinding out progress? Don’t Byte Your Tongue, a platformer by Daniyal Khan Asif Ghufran, pushes that question to its limits, but not in a good way.
Don’t Byte Your Tongue starts off with a simple premise—get to the top of the world. The story of this platformer begins with two nameless, sentient computers, who are tragically torn from each other by a meteor. After falling through the stratosphere, you have to climb back to your sweetheart through a vaporwave-inspired skyline. Along the way, you’ll run into a few strangers to help you on your journey. Progressively harder platforming and a constantly changing soundtrack bring something new to each level.
This Time with Feeling!
Within the first few minutes, one thing is apparent—the game feels good to play. Movement is easy—swipe your hand across the screen to launch your character through the air. Bounce off a wall and ricochet into previously unreachable areas. Double tap after launching yourself to get a little more momentum and clamber up to new heights. Both your character and all of the platforms are big, blocky rectangles, so there’s no confusion as to whether or not you’ll stick the landing. The controls are exceptionally responsive, which is quite satisfying once you get the hang of it.
Not only that, but these mechanics accomplish what many rage-inducing games struggle to do—it holds the player accountable for their mistakes. Any time you miss a platform or jump at the wrong angle, you can’t blame the game. It always feels like it was your fault, which is the game’s strongest selling point. This movement holds up for the entire playthrough, save a single, minor bug. Playing through, I had multiple scenarios where I was positioned on the corner of a platform, yet my character was still airborne. This meant that I couldn’t launch myself again in order to readjust and was essentially soft-locked until I either reset or fell off of the platform. Luckily, events like these were few and far between, so I let it slide.
A Note on Pacing
One of this game’s biggest downfalls (pun intended) is its pacing. Each level introduces a new mechanic, which sounds good in theory. But the game doesn’t really add to previous knowledge. For instance, the second stage makes use of gears, where you have to rotate platforms in order to progress. It would be fascinating to see how this would mesh with other mechanics in other areas of the game. However, it’s only practically used that one time. The gears show up occasionally in future levels, but it isn’t integral to the level at all. On the other hand, some ideas are blatantly copy-pasted from one area to the next. If you didn’t like the section where you had to jump back and forth through invisible platforms, guess what? You’re going to have to do it a second time. Maybe even a third, if you’re even invested enough to keep going. All eight levels, depending on your skill as a gamer, could theoretically take 20 minutes or 40 hours. And that is my main gripe with Don’t Byte Your Tongue.
Bland and Uninspired
For the average gamer, Don’t Byte Your Tongue is virtually unplayable. I consider myself as a capable player, and I will say firsthand that this platformer is unbelievably hard. It feels less like a game as it does a brutal lecture in physics. The only viable game mode is Easy because anything harder than that lacks checkpoints. That’s right—if you just spent 4 hours meticulously climbing up to level 6 and mess up once, you might be starting back at the tutorial stage. And I don’t think any sane person would seriously want to make that trek again, especially given the lack of scenery.
Throughout most of the game, every platform is the same textureless color, and the background is a stagnant, Sega Sunset-inspired JPEG. Sometimes, platforms are invisible, so the game will literally be your character sprite and nothing else. The cold and lifeless NPCs don’t exactly help set the tone, either. They have two dialogue options each—one to help you on your journey and one to mock you for falling. There isn’t any voice-acting in the game, so I can only assume this design choice was born out of laziness. And unfortunately, even the attempt at mocking the player isn’t really genuine or clever. The whole experience feels more like playtesting a project that is very much still in development. Except instead of getting paid to playtest, I was required to buy it. It’s a shame that a game with potential fell as hard as the poor, nameless sprite I was playing. Needless to say, I will not be picking up Don’t Byte Your Tongue again anytime soon.
