Disclaimer: I received a copy of Spooky Chase developed by Burning Goat from publisher QUByte Game Studio for the Nintendo Switch for 420MacMan's #IndieSelect. The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels. All pictures and words in this article unless otherwise noted are from my own playthrough.
Spooky Chase from Burning Goat, is an interesting game and is of a type that I have never played before so I am not 100% sure it can be classified with a simple "platformer" or "auto-runner" genre title. The game is an auto-runner, kind of. Once your character moves, they do not stop moving unless they die or you reach the goal. There are plenty of platforms to jump off of and from and there are pits, spikes, and projectiles you have to avoid to stay alive. There are enemies that you can either avoid or jump on to stop them (make them disappear?). There are collectibles and special optional bonus items too. But what makes this game unique, at least to me since it is the first time I have come across this mechanic, is how you progress through each stage. Spooky Chase is broken up into multiple stages, clustered together by setting and theme. For each stage that I have come across (excluding the opening stage and bonus balloon stages), you have to collect 10 flags and an optional Yellow Balloon. Once you capture a flag, you respawn elsewhere in the stage with an icon pointing you to the location of the next flag as well as its distance away from you (which comes in handy in later stages). After your first flag is captured, an enemy appears but follows the exact path you took to capture your first flag. Each flag after the first creates another enemy that follows the path, repeating this process until the stage is filled with nine enemy versions of your past self running and jumping, making things increasingly difficult. Let me just show you.
As mentioned above, the layout of the levels are broken up into groups of individual stages by setting and theme, with each level and stage unlockable after you have gathered a certain number of Red Flags. All flags start out as red, and become grey upon retrying a stage. So if on your first run, you captured the first three Red Flags then died, those first three flags on your next attempt will all be grey, with the remaining seven flags as red. This is to distinguish between flags you need to unlock additional levels and stages, from flags you need to just progress through the stage until you capture a flag you previously have not captured before. The levels and stages have been set up with amounts of flags needed so that you do not need to capture all 30 flags in a level in order to proceed to the next one. The same with the stages within the levels, oftentimes unlocking one or both stages within a level before even completing the first one (getting 10/10 Red Flags and the Yellow Ballon).
And then there are the Yellow Balloons that act as an optional bonus that appears on the stage before you capture the 10th flag. Currently only having collected two Yellow Ballons and unlocked the first Balloon Stage (for lack of a better name) named "Middle of the Road," I can only comment on this stage and what I think the subsequent balloon stages are about. In "Middle of the Road" you give a not-at-all-creepy clown the balloon, they give you a pair of shoes that give you the ability to sprint (when you press the Y button), and then they proceed to chase you down in a car as you sprint through collecting candies (which I will get to next) and clocks which add a few seconds onto your timer. At the time of this writing, I have not unlocked the second balloon stage (requiring three Yellow Balloons) but I assume, based off of "Middle of the Road" that you earn new abilities that you can use to make stages easier. Or potentially more difficult, because if you are sprinting in stages to collect flags, that means that your past sprinting self is now a current sprinting enemy. I find it to be a pretty cool double-edged sword mechanic that makes you consider whether or not to use special abilities because it may be helpful in the present, but down the road to have a stage full of nine sprinting enemies could be extremely hazardous.
Because you do not need to collect every flag in every stage to open up new stages or levels, I have been playing stages for long enough to get a feel for the layout and difficulty overall but not spending a long time trying to get all 10 Red Flags and the Yellow Balloon. Most of the time I have collected five to seven Red Flags before moving on (after dying 10+ more times) so that I can help open up more stages and levels. As you might expect with this approach to Spooky Chase, I finally hit a wall where all of the Flags that I could comfortably capture is no longer enough to open any more stages or levels. My goal now is to go back to earlier levels (which presumably are easier) and try to capture the remaining Red Flags and if the Yellow Balloon seems achievable.
Now, as for the candies appear in stages and give you something to collect in-between capturing flags, and are optional as well. When you collect a certain number of candies, you unlock new characters to play as, but none of the characters offer any particular bonus over any of the others, they are purely cosmetic. Thankfully, you keep candies in stages even if you die, so you are not entirely penalized for dying. I do not go out of my way to collect them as I try to keep my path to the flag as short as possible to keep the past-self-turned-enemies as condensed as possible, but I will collect them if they happen to be in my way. I basically just see them as something to keep me occupied on my way to the flag, which conveniently enough also counts as a candy even if it is a Grey Flag. I would not be surprised if there is not at least one costume that is unlockable by completing either a stage or some aspect of the game and is not behind a candy pay-wall.
When I was first playing through the game I felt that this would be a fun multiplayer game if only to have more past-self-enemies flooding the screen so you would have to not only be aware of your own past-selves but watch out for where the other person was as well. Although, trying to have the game account for multiple players in the regular stages and adjusting the difficulty for multiple players going for the same flag or even the stages with dynamic effects (such as "Pumpkin Bats" which I get to down in the P.S. would make this nearly impossible. But instead of the regular game, the local multiplayer is a single-stage survival mode where you and up to three other players (four total) run around the stage with a three-minute timer, collecting candies, and shields (which allow you to take an extra hit before dying) while avoiding the past-self-enemies of yourself and the other player. While I usually do not play many multiplayer games, I can definitely see the appeal in this mode, especially when playing with all four players, it is probably hilarious and a lot of fun.
Spooky Chase is a challenging game, but I have had a lot of fun partly because of the challenge, but also because I feel that, for the most part, the game plays fair. Some stages present difficult environmental aspects like reduced lighting, a lot of spikes on nearly every surface, dynamic foreground effects that obscure the ground making it difficult (or temporarily impossible) to decipher where the ground stops and opens up into a pit, but the main antagonist just ends up being the path your past self took. I have come across a couple of instances where a flag spawned next to where a previous flag had also spawned so it becomes more difficult to avoid the past-self-enemy. And the number of times I have accidentally run into a past-self-enemy I could count on about 20 pairs of hands. But this is something that I cannot fault the game for, only my ability to remember the paths I took and getting to know stages well enough to know the best route (shortest and most concise) to get the flag so as to not to create a hazardous path for my future self.
There is probably a deeper meaning somewhere in there.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Just a Little Bit Closer
P.S. If you wanted to know why I was stuck where I was in the game on "The Pumpkin Bats" and why I had only two Red Flags when I usually try to get 5-7 before moving on (after dying a great many more times), here is an example of that stage:
P.P.S. After playing some more after completing the main body of this article, I did earn enough Red Flags to open up the next stage, and I can honestly say that I hate this new stage and do feel that it is perhaps, a bit unfair. Or maybe there is a skill that I have not picked up that might make this stage easier?
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