Almost There (

2019

) ½

What if Super Meat Boy [2010] was drained of all its personality, brutality, and irreverence? What if all that was left was a bland tech demo with precise controls and challenging platforming? Would I still love it? The answer, as it turns out is a resounding “No” followed by demand “Why would you think that is a good idea?” A big reason why I love Super Meat Boy [2010] so much is because it is a window back into a better past, be it the violent cartoons of Newgrounds circa 2000, the challenging platformers of the late 1980s early 1990s, or the indie-game explosion of the late 2000s early 2010s. Each one of these historical moments holds treasured memories for me personally, and being reminded of them by such a skillfully made and polished game is just a recipe for pleasant nostalgia. As we saw with Celeste [2018], take that away that core and replace it with some pastel Canadian bullshit and my appreciation of the overall product plummets. But what if you took away all that personality and didn't bother to replace it with anything, leaving instead an empty husk of a game than an actual artistic work? Well, then you would have today's game, Almost There.

Almost There lives up to its name in one sense; it does not feel like a fully realized game. It's like developer Bony Yousuf made a prototype as a proof of concept for a tough-as-nails platform game he was working on, slapped on a pretty background and added a soundtrack. It feels less like a game and more like an academic excise to find the exact point between a tech demo and finished product. It doesn't even succeed at being the most minimalist platformer I've ever played either, as VVVVVV [2010] is both simpler and more vastly more compelling than Almost There.

The player character is a gray square wearing a headband (the most impressive graphically feature is the trail that this headband leaves as you move). There is no animation, your “character” just glides across the screen as you press the keys or joystick. The object for each level is the same, reach a glowing dot on the other end of a series of platforming challenges. Complete the stage and you'll be rewarded with a star, but if you can finish it fast enough you can unlock another two stars. To the game's credit, there are a lot of different obstacles, ranging from pits, to spikes, to force fields, to spinning lasers, to meat-saws, to auto guns that launch missiles at you.

The biggest problem here is that there is no sense of progression whatsoever. In Super Meat Boy [2010] I had new worlds to unlock, a girlfriend to save, and bonus characters to find. All this was enough to push me through to the game's ending. I wanted to see what the next world looks like, I wanted to see what this new character could do, and most of all I wanted to knock the shit out of Dr. Fetus. In Almost There, there are no bonus characters to unlock, there's no story to complete, and the next world will look exactly like the current one only with a different background color. The stars seem like an obvious way to add in some kind of progression (at the very least they should allow you to unlock a different colored bandanna) but the only thing they do is unlock achievements. The only reason to do the difficult platforming challenges is to unlock more difficult platforming challenges. A few people may be able to get into that system, but for me, it just feels like dreary busy work.

I love difficult games, but there needs to be something more pushing me to actually get through them, otherwise, there's just a boring slog. Super Meat Boy [2010] has its unique world and atmosphere, Dark Souls [2011] has its mysterious plot and sense of discovery, Celeste [2017] has its emotional story (assuming, of course, you cared about the characters more than I did). Almost There needs something like this, but unfortunately, it has nothing. This is disappointing because the game is sound enough in terms of mechanics that I suspect it could be an excellent basis for a more fleshed out game. All it needs are a few unique mechanics (as it stands you are just Meat Boy without his unique slipperiness and blazing fast speed), a real sense of progression, and an art style that doesn't look like a tech demo. That sounds like a tall order when said all at once, but the developer has plainly already mastered the basics that he needs. The rest is all about finding his own unique artistic voice and fine-tuning the core he's already made. I'm looking forward to seeing more from him in the future.