Oh, the Eighties. Pineapple and cheese on sticks at a distant relative’s wedding. The actual birth of the RickRoll. MTV, shockingly, playing music videos. The collapse of the Soviet Union and above all, the launch of the quintessential platformer, the crème de la crème, Super Mario Bros. Great times, I’m sure that we would all agree. Without this progenitor of all things jumpy, would we ever have gotten to play Mainframes, the latest side/up/down/all-around 2D platformer from The Arcade Crew and Assoupi? Well, it’s lucky that we did, because it’s a banger!
With a cutesy pixel art style, fittingly reminiscent of Super Meat Boy or perhaps a NES-era Kirby title, Mainframes is set within the workings of a PC, open windows becoming a platforming playground for Floppy, your 8-bit avatar, to puzzle and bounce his way around. It’s genuinely charming with a myriad cast of adorable characters and a sprinkle of magic that makes you remember that this is how games used to look. Well, they didn’t, they were never this fantastic looking, and certainly never this interesting and unique.
Mainframes makes use of the Windows 3.1 aesthetic to genuinely great effect, featuring “windows within Windows” as puzzle elements or by using “Bump.sh” as floating text to help mark out the floating springs in mid-air. There’s even an homage to the classic green hills of Windows XP in the background, warming the hearts of those old enough to remember it the first time around. It’s not all warm and fuzzy nostalgia though, as the art itself has a slight CRT effect which, whilst certainly authentic to the time, I found actually started to strain my eyes during longer play sessions. Maybe it’s time for another eye test for my own eighties born optics?
In a manner that I readily attribute to Nintendo platformers, specifically a rather well known Italian plumber, Mainframes takes an idea and runs with it, introducing the player to a concept before seeing just how far it can push it. Just one example would be platforms that move around in the level as you jump around. After being shown that you can use the triggers on your controller to change which platform is affected at a given time (yes, a controller is highly recommended, as you’ll need something to launch across the room every now and again), you’ll start with just a few relatively simple acrobatic jumps to complete. But just a couple of levels later, you’ll be contorting your fingers in a digital version of Riverdance, trying to coordinate timed button presses and on-screen manoeuvring to stop yourself falling to your demise for the 67th time in a row. Mainframe can be properly unforgiving at times, with deviously placed obstacles to block your progression or collectible friends just ever so slightly out of reach, but not so much that you won’t waste a good ten minutes trying to reach the little collectibles.
I don’t want to spoil too many of these ideas as these are what drove me onward through each of the beautifully distinctive worlds, wondering what delights each end of level elevator will deliver me to next. Suffice to say, Mainframes is jam-packed with innovation and never once ceased to amaze me with imaginative and crazy ideas to wrap my head and fingers around. This isn’t just limited to the bigger picture of each overarching area, as there are unique challenges to hunt down and master, each with a mechanic that you may never see again, with a few even offering a time to beat or a high score to challenge. For those achievement hunters out there, it’s an absolute dream, with a plethora of collectibles and fun/annoyingly frustrating (delete as appropriate) challenges to master. Y’know, like beating the game without dying. Go on, should be easy. I believe in you.
Mainframes is beyond doubt an impressive game. It looks terrific; sounds fantastic, and handles like a dream. But, it’s in the unique moments that Mainframes truly shines. It’s the ideas that are lovingly iterated on. The unexpected and unusual cast of lovable characters; the left turns when you’re expecting a right. No, it’s not perfect, but I’m not one of these people who won’t take anything less. I think that Mainframes is just what my 2D platformer loving brethren out there need at a time when releases of this calibre in the genre are few and far between. Mainframes is one of those games that I know that I’m going to keep chipping away at, looking in all of the nooks and crannies, finding all that Assoupi has to offer us. I already know that, no matter how much there is, I’ll still be hungry for more.
