Penny’s Big Breakaway was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I love 3D platformers, and they’ve been having a bit of a revival in recent years, with AAA and AA entries not just from old stalwart Nintendo but also companies like Sony and The Embracer Group. There have also been more than a few indies, and that’s where things get a bit dicier. I love a lot of indie games, but while there are a few genre standouts like Tinykin, most indie 3D platformers range from okay but not very satisfying (like Mail Mole) to legitimately among the worst games I have played in recent years (like the truly awful Clive ‘N’ Wrench.) The idea of a 3D platformer made by the team behind Sonic Mania and backed by the resources of Private Division before Take Two unceremoniously gutted it was pretty exciting. I hoped that Penny’s Big Breakaway would be an innovative experience bursting with creativity and polished to a sheen like Sonic Mania.

Two out of three ain’t bad, but it ain’t good enough either.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is creative and innovative. You play Penny, a yo-yo based street performer who starts the game excited to try out for a huge national talent contest that seems to be the central event of the surreal nation she lives in. This contest is a huge deal and is dominated every year by Emperor Eddie, who appears to be in the rare archetype of “wacky despot” and rules over the country with a goofy and colorful iron fist. Things go wrong with your sentient yo-yo companion, named Gusto, during the contest try out and you find yourself accused of causing significant mayhem and on the run for the rest of the game. You are pursued by Eddie’s penguin agents across the various zones as Penny fights to clear her name and, eventually, defeat Eddie and free the country from his not very authoritarian rule.

The story is, to be frank, kind of throwaway. There are animated comic cut scenes and you do meet some characters along the way, but it’s treated with less seriousness than even a Mario or Sonic story, let alone something like Tinykin. It’s just a framework for sending you through a variety of environments and introducing the colorful boss characters. That’s fine, but it means that the game’s appeal lives and dies entirely by what happens while you are controlling the character and you will not be compelled to finish by wanting to find out what happens. What happens is always either completely out of left-field nonsense, or exactly what you were expecting. Sometimes both.

The game part of Penny’s Big Breakaway saw considerably more thought put into it. Most 3D platformers these days are collectathons, styled after Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, with expansive levels dotted with specific challenges and a bunch of McGuffins to pursue. Penny’s Big Breakaway is made by massive Sonic the Hedgehog fans and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, much more in the Sonic Adventure mode. What you get is a series of linear levels, selected from a menu, and the ultimately goal is either to get to the end of the level to move on to the next, or defeat a boss in one of the half-dozen or so such encounters in the game. The levels are divided into worlds and each world has its own look to it and, generally, a few unique mechanics. One world might have large water areas you need to build up momentum to skim across while another might have rotating cylinders to jump on and lighting hazards to avoid. Later levels will reintroduce and build on some of the earlier mechanics, making the game more complex and challenging as it goes on.

There are 11 worlds in all and they do start to feel a little samey after a while. The varied level mechanics do keep things somewhat fresh, but there are so many shared elements and design choices that they mostly blend together. Ziplines, air jets, and magic carpet rides are introduced and then are re-used frequently for the rest of the game. There are also powerups that are introduced one by one over the first five or six worlds, and even a few new enemy types, though they are almost all varieties of penguins. Combat is to be strictly avoided in this game, rather than being any kind of highlight.

Mechanically, Penny’s Big Breakaway is quite unusual. Penny herself is a fairly standard, albeit slow, 3D platformer character. She can run and jump and that’s about it. The game’s actual mechanics come from her use of Gusto, the yo-yo, who has quite a lot of moves associated with it. Penny can fling it out in any direction via the right stick, a move that is used to strike enemies or objects. She can also swing it around her in a circle, a move used to knock away enemies, light torches with the appropriate powerup, or generate a helicopter effect and glide with a different powerup. She can also throw out the yo-yo in front of her and cause it to hang in the air as a swing point, a move that is necessary to get across many of the larger gaps in the game. Perhaps most importantly Penny can ride on the Yo-Yo, like a lumberjack rolling a log, and use it for momentum-based movement down the game’s various ramps and half-pipes. This is how you build speed and is where the team’s Sonic roots show through most clearly, including a move equivalent to the spin-dash, though unlike Sonic, Penny will lose speed over time unless she’s on an incline so it’s more difficult to maintain top speed.

Although there are three tokens to collect in every non-boss level and three side quests to complete (things like collecting certain optional objects or doing movement tricks to collect score, or bringing an object to another character without getting hit under a time limit) the true challenge of the game is clearly in maintaining speed and momentum through a level. It’s not particularly difficult to finish the levels and make it through the game, except for a few frustrating points I’ll talk about shortly, but moving quickly and maintaining momentum is much more challenging. Some people have talked about how they didn’t really enjoy the game their first time through trying to collect the tokens and do the challenges but came around to it once they started playing it more like a Sonic game, with a focus on keeping up momentum and moving quickly. It even has some of Sonic’s alternate path mechanics, where if you approach an area quickly it’s possible to get to a higher path and get through an area more quickly and easily than if you stayed lower down. The fact that the camera is fixed, with Penny generally progressing into the screen to advance, gives it a very Sonic feel much of the time.

In theory this is fine, and it’s even good to have an alternative to the collectathon genre. Aesthetically the game looks gorgeous, with lots of flat-shaded polygons in rich hues giving it a unique look reminiscent of certain Dreamcast games, like Super Magnetic Neo and, of course, Sonic Adventure. The problem is that if it looks like a Dreamcast game at times it plays like one too, which is to say…it can be pretty janky. Other people have written about dropped inputs and I’m not a good enough gamer to know if that’s the exact problem, but what I do know is that the control feels inconsistent. I never completely figured out how to chain together certain moves, like rolling on the yo-yo, jumping, swinging, and dropping back into a roll, which I know is possible but I could never pull off consistently. Getting a good speed with the spindash style move was hard, as was maintaining velocity on the water or in a mid-air swing. I know some of these things are possible because I did them, but I could never get them to come out consistently the way I wanted.

Part of the problem is that the game has a lot of hidden mechanics, including undisclosed moves like a wall-jump, among others. This game really needed a well-produced tutorial to teach you how to play it, and I’m not sure why it’s not there. Maybe they wanted players to discover all that stuff themselves, as yet another throwback, but it’s not a lot of fun to have challenges that expect you to use a tool you haven’t even been told about. Especially in a game that doesn’t always function as intended, or at least feels like it doesn’t.

Other issues in the game were clearly choices. Enemies consist almost entirely of swarms of penguins, sometimes walking around in groups, sometimes bursting out from behind breakable walls to attack you, sometimes rolling around in giant rings of linked birds or dropping from balloons or even carrying around big nets trying to trap Penny. When the penguins get Penny they grab her, progressively slowing her down and restricting her movement until 6 have a hold of you at which point you get reset to your last checkpoint. You can swat them away or shake them off by using your yo-yo, and “combat” in the game often devolves into frantically spinning trying to knock the penguins away. Sometimes they’ll be hurled off a cliff or die but often they’ll come back and try to grab you again. Most of the time the best strategy is just to not get caught, and by the end of the game I was pretty adept at avoiding the penguins altogether or shaking them off if they grabbed me, but I never actually enjoyed engaging with them. At best they were another form of stage hazard and at worst a true irritation. 3D platformers don’t need good combat to be good games, but this is maybe the worst I’ve ever experienced, and being grabbed is incredibly annoying early on when you haven’t quite gotten the hang of things yet.

Fortunately, the game is very forgiving, with unlimited continues coming only at the expense of score if you lose all 4 of your health meter chunks (restorable through ice cream bars) and the only cost being to your score, which doesn’t really matter for anything beyond bragging rights and maybe completion percentage. This is a game that I think anyone could finish, despite clearly being built with Sonic style speedrunning in mind, and I appreciate that. Boss fights are manageable and generally consist of standard “avoid the attacks, then strike the weakpoint” mechanics that aren’t too difficult to learn. The biggest frustrations come when the game wants you to do things that are hard to consistently pull off, like maintain enough speed to skim over water or make difficult swing jumps that can be hard to judge in terms of perspective and also hard to pull off mechanically because of the inconsistency in the move. There were definitely checkpoints where I died multiple times before being able to continue, but I don’t think any of the levels took me much over 10 minutes and most took significantly less. The game overall took about 8 hours to reach the end of, but I pursued a fair number of side quests and tokens and could have cut the time down significantly if I hadn’t.

Overall I had a mixed experience with Penny’s Big Breakaway. I certainly enjoyed it at times, and when things were firing on all cylinders and I was moving quickly through a level or meaningfully engaging with a platforming challenge I would even say that I liked it quite a bit. Unfortunately there were just too many points when the game felt frustrating or just…off. This style of game really needs a very high level of polish to work well, and maybe you could get familiar enough with Penny’s quirks to work around its flaws but I certainly didn’t. Another game that did something similar was the speedrunning portion of Astro’s Playroom, and I adored that, so I know it’s a game style that does work for me, I just needed the game to be as responsive as Astro was, and Penny just isn’t. Or maybe the skill ceiling is too high and there are too many concealed mechanics. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

The graphics are great and though I haven’t mentioned the music yet it is also fantastic. Tee Lopes doesn’t miss. It’s a pleasurable game to look at and hear. It’s mostly fun to play. I’m not really trying to warn people away from it, especially if they dig early 3D Sonic games. But it just doesn’t have the polish that it would have needed to click with me. I put it firmly in the fun but flawed category, a game that I liked but took months to finish and probably won’t go back to for the optional stuff, at least not often. A 7/10.

Penny’s Big Breakaway does not seem to be a hit based on trophy data (and it has an under 20% completion rate based on trophy data, which is rough) and how quickly it went on sale. Private Division is done so I doubt there will be another one, unless Evening Star (the developer) owns the IP. I do hope the team stays together and makes another game, 2D or 3D, though. Making 3D platformers is difficult, and this is above average for an indie title in the genre. The game had a lot of good ideas and I hope the team can learn from it and move forward. Penny’s Big Breakaway may not have been the stunning 3D debut I was hoping for, but with a little bit of improvement it could be the prologue to something truly special.