Well Vinny, I finally did it. I picked up Pepper Grinder. Ahr Ech's Pepper Grinder is a drillformer (OK, enough portmanteaus from me for a while) that has the titular adventurer Pepper run afoul of her pirate rival Mint who, despite being a breath of fresh air, immediately earns the heroine's contempt by appropriating her box of treasure and departing with it along with her army of teal-skinned "narlings". Pepper has one tool left at her disposal, however: her trusty mechanical handheld drill, Grinder, with which she's capable of digging through soft ground and defeating anything in her path. This simple plotline sets up a relatively short adventure through four worlds, each containing around five or six stages, as Pepper grinds her way (phrasing) over and/or through various obstacles and hazards, occasionally adopting other drill-powered machinery in the process.

The first thing I'll say about Pepper Grinder is that it's a whole lot of fun to just move through its levels with the sort of alacrity afforded by a drill that not only allows you to breach certain terrain but launches you out of it at a high velocity (especially if you remember to hit the dash before exiting) via which you can then enter another patch of incongruously floating dirt and continue onward and upward. You have full 360 degree movement with the drill which takes a little while to get used to given how sharp the turning cycles can be, but once you've found the right rhythm the levels tend to whizz by: fitting, as the game has a whole secondary time trial aspect where the feelings of challenge and speed reach their zenith. More on that later. In addition to the standard drill-based traversal there's also a whole lot of inventive set-pieces peppered, so to speak, throughout the game. I mentioned the drill-powered machinery before: this could include a minigun that fires as you drill, a snowmobile that flies over hills and plows through enemies, and even an unstoppable mech for one memorable section. These sequences tend to be much more action-oriented and less about the precision movement of hopping around patches of accessible terrain—which requires carefully exiting dirt mounds at the right angles, while perhaps also using the drill to hook onto grappling points that start appearing more often in the second-half of the game—and ably serve to vent a lot of the frustration that may have slowly built up trying to navigate the game's more finnicky sections.

Naturally in a platformer like this there's a whole bunch of collectibles to find too. Each course has five skull coins, similar to the Dragon/Green Coins of so many Super Mario games, and they tend to be well-hidden in areas that might need you to drill through a damaged-looking wall or take a detour to the edges of the screen. They're marked sequentially too, so you'll know if you missed one along with some idea of whereabouts in the stage it might be located, if you found the ones directly preceding and succeeding it. Stages also contain a whole lot of currency by way of gold pieces and gemstones, sometimes placed in lines around the course as a means of guiding you towards the correct path but just as frequently in remote areas or inside breakable objects. Both these item types are used to buy things at the curiosity shops that open up on the overworld maps of every area: you can spend the skull coins on cosmetic changes (Pepper has a number of different hair and cape palettes to choose from) or on the game's "sticker album", which lets you assemble your own action scenes through a set of scene pages and sprite stickers. The skull coins also let you buy a golden key, one per world, that opens up a bonus level that's a little tougher than the rest. Each world culminates in a tough boss fight that, given Pepper's relatively low amount of health, requires some careful pattern memorization if you hope to out-damage it. I should say, though, that you can buy (at some considerable expense) additional health pips prior to entering a level, though with the understanding that they'll only be around for the one attempt. They might not be all that helpful for regular courses but could be enough to give you the upper hand if a certain boss fight is giving you trouble.

Pepper Grinder can be a game of highs and lows depending on the current section, though fortunately leaning more frequently towards the former. Pepper's standard four pips of health drain pretty rapidly especially given the extremely low invulnerability time after hits, as you'll often get hurt twice by a trap or hazardous liquid before you're able to escape to a safe spot, and the checkpointing can get relatively sparse (as do the turnip-like healing items) as you get deeper into the game and the challenge level escalates to match. This, coupled with how tricky it can be to use the analog stick to accurately navigate through these small mounds of dirt that might have bombs or thorns in close proximity means you could find yourself spending a significant chunk of time just trying to get through specific sections of a level. I also had issues with fighting enemies, since it was never always obvious why I got hurt running into an enemy drill first except that occasionally the hitbox on their weapon managed to touch you before your drill touched them (this happens a lot if you try to drill down on an enemy from above). All of these difficulty problems come to an ugly head in the game's time trial mode—one necessary for 100% completion if not for just seeing the end of the game, since some of the collectibles can only be attained as prizes for hitting the silver and gold time targets—which not only requires you beat these levels via the most optimal route but to do so in a single attempt absent any checkpointing, which is getting to speedrunner-level difficult given the health scarcity. To be clear, playing through the game casually is just shy of a Super Meat Boy tier masocore experience, but the incredibly punitive time trials push things way beyond that: this is how the game adjusts for its svelte amount of content, I suspect.

Without concerning oneself with any aneurysm-invoking time trial horseshit though, Pepper Grinder is a game that never wears out its welcome, combining its appealing drill-enhanced precision platforming with a wonderful mix of speed and spectacle and unpredictability, akin to the Donkey Kong Country series and more specifically their two Donkey Kong Country Returns reboots. The times where you're blasting through packs of narlings with a gun or smushing them with a giant vehicle is a great means of breaking up the otherwise mentally-taxing precision sections which require more concentration as well as just being cathartic in general, and its dialogue-free, story-light arcade game sensibility lends itself well to the violent and stylish direction. It's a game that I worry will be lost in the crowd this year, especially given its wisp of a runtime in comparison to the huge AAA and JRPG timesinks that 2024 was notably strong about producing, but I think if Astro Bot, Nintendo World Championships, or Neon White from 2022 put you into the mood for fiendishly difficult competitive speedrunning (as they apparently did for half the Giant Bomb staff) then Pepper Grinder might be worth a look. And if, instead of all that, you just wanted an inventive 2D platformer that had you exclaiming "damn, that's cool" under your breath every fifteen minutes, Pepper Grinder can serve you well enough in that role too.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Did you put down the pepper grinder?