I Wanna Follow The World

As a disclaimer, I personally know the developer. I played an hour in, died 445 times, and completed the screen with horizontal moving platforms and gravity reversing arrows.

As someone who has never played (only watched) I Wanna Be the Guy for myself, I'm happy to say that the original doesn't feel like a prerequisite! Normal mode felt like the amount of difficulty I expected: tough but fair.

I appreciate the ways that level mechanics are reigned in: for example, simply reversing the gravity disrupted my jump accuracy, so the design rolled back to basic platforming for a while, then sparsely overlapped mechanics for controlled difficulty spikes (no pun intended). Frequent checkpoints and safe platforms allow you to rest and reflect.

The tightness on the turnaround from learning a mechanic to subverting it is rapid, but satisfying. For instance, the orange platforms' ability to rise above their starting point is unintuitive, so you are closed in with one to encourage playful interaction. The tendency to abandon those platforms is used against the player immediately after: it feels deserved, not frustrating!

At a close second to jumping, dying is what you'll do most in the game, but fortunately, each failure rewards you with a humorous quote or image. They oscillate between trendy Gen Z conjurations to mid-2000s meme culture, so even if you're picky about your in-game humor, you'll likely enjoy a significant chunk of what's on offer (and thankfully, none came off as truly mean-spirited to me).

Other sneaky tricks, such as killing the player with the bottom of the screen above, fall within reason of the game's rules and take advantage of the player's assumptions. They're far enough apart that I don't feel I'm being griefed, and instead I feel like I'm in on the joke. The level design is used to produce physical comedy, rather than relying on visual gags or one-off rug pulls, which I greatly respect.