A Steam code for Peppered randomly showed up in my email a couple of weeks ago, billing itself as an “existential platformer.” Without looking up anything else about the game, I installed it to find out what the hell that was supposed to mean.
It turned out to be a perfectly apt description. Peppered is a dark comedy about what you decide to do when nothing seems to matter. It’s also a short-run platformer with a branching narrative, where your choices, successes, and failures can change the course of your run.
Peppered is set on an alien world, which used to be ruled by a tyrannical entity known as the God of Death, until it was sealed away by the human visitor Theodore. Since then, no one on the planet has been able to die. If they’re fatally injured, they painlessly reappear at various designated respawn points. Some people use that for their daily commute.
Every year, Theodore returns on the anniversary of his victory to reinforce the seal on the God of Death’s prison. On the 100th annual “Immortality Day,” however, Theodore simply fails to arrive.
You enter the story as an unnamed sheep/goat/rabbit thing of indeterminate gender, who has a boring office job in the heart of the city. As you watch the Immortality Day celebration unravel on TV, you learn that if nobody steps up to take Theodore’s place, the seal will break and the God of Death will escape. Despite that, everyone in the city opts to wait for Theodore instead of taking action themselves.
At this point, you can decide to either let that happen, which ends the game, or set out into the city to fix the prison yourself, since nobody else seems to want to do it. That’s when Peppered really begins.
My first impression of Peppered’s actual gameplay was that it’s an affectionate parody of “kaizo” platformers, like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, or The End is Nigh. It’s created an entire setting by narratively justifying the typical features of the subgenre.
Since no one in Peppered’s city can permanently die, nobody cares about basic safety measures, so entire industrial zones have been made from live wires, open flame, laser grids, and running buzzsaws. In fact, you can only get through certain areas by deliberately killing yourself at the right time or place so you can respawn in the next room.
It’s worth noting that, despite its kaizo influences, Peppered isn’t particularly difficult. On a blind run, I got through the game in about 4 hours, and only (“only”) died about 40 times. I could see it being tricky for new or inexperienced players, but anyone with some platformer chops will get through Peppered in a lazy afternoon.
The real challenge to Peppered comes from its branching narrative, which can dramatically change your path through the game. This includes several obvious decisions, like whether or not to join the antagonists’ team, but also depends on whether you win or lose certain boss fights and special encounters. Either way, you’re only given one chance at any of them, which leads you towards one of 11 possible endings.
I didn’t know that on my first run, so it was a surprise when I screwed up a couple of fights and the game continued anyway. Then I reached Peppered’s halfway point and got to watch as bureaucratic nonsense allowed the God of Death to escape. That changed Peppered’s entire central mechanic, as the game didn’t get any easier, but I no longer had an infinite number of extra lives. That added a new sense of tension to what had previously been a jokey Monty Python sketch of a game, as every stupid death suddenly counted against me.
That adds quite a bit of replay value, as your route through Peppered can change significantly between players and attempts, and it’s difficult to call any of its outcomes a complete success or failure. It’s actually got quite a bit to say across its running time, about life, death, society, imminent disaster, and particularly how and what you choose to value.
Given how Peppered is structured, I do wish it had a level select. While a few of its biggest decisions are made in the first 20 minutes, so you’d need to replay it from scratch to reach certain endings anyway, it’d be nice if I could skip straight to major branch points.
Other than that, I don’t really have any notes. Peppered is accessible, funny, and thoughtful, which are weird descriptors for a game that’s occasionally about throwing yourself into sawblades on purpose. It’s probably not a great introduction to platformers as a genre, since a lot of its best jokes are inside baseball, but it’s the most playable philosophy text ever created. Check it out.
[PEPPERED: an existential platformer, developed & published by Mostly Games, is now available on PC and Mac via Steam for $14.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Mostly Games PR representative.]
