Quetzal is an upcoming 2D platformer all about quick decisions and precision timing. The combination of those two are the only way you stand a chance of making it through the depths of the Earth, to restore balance to the world.
Falling toward spikes, dropping to be in line with bullets and tumbling towards rivers of lava might seem like things that you definitely shouldn’t be doing in any sort of game, but Quetzal requires you to put yourself directly in the line of danger in order to deflect, reflect or narrowly miss things that will instantly kill you. It’s brutal and incredibly unforgiving, but also very quickly slides you into a state of high focus — ‘The Zone’ — that’s normally only found in bullet hells, masocore platformers or rhythm games.
I was lucky enough to sit down with Quetzal while recently at i68 where it actually had quite a large presence compared to some of the other games on show. I had a few issues with getting going, namely identifying the spikes and spike traps, however once that all clicked into place I had a lot of fun with the demo that was on show. There’s a great feeling that comes with landing that rebounding attack — triggered through attacking in the direction of the object — and restarting the jump.
It’s handy that it feels so rewarding, because that’s the heart of Quetzal, and before long you’ll be bouncing off of projectiles, double-jumping, bouncing off another projectile and double-jumping again in order to cross over lava. That and you’ll be scaling thin vertical spaces, carefully bouncing from spiked side to spiked side. In practice the latter is very similar to the wall-jumping mechanic that we normally see in platform games, however, if you time your attacks wrong then you are guaranteed to hurt or kill yourself. And, that’s good fun, if a little intense.
I played through quite a large part of the demo, and really enjoyed the challenges that were on show. In fact, there was only one time when it wasn’t immediately obvious which path I had to take — there was a spike block put in place by the developer for their own benefit — and so the only issues I had with progressing were due to me not quite understanding the timing or projectiles, or occasionally missing a hit and casting myself into lava. That said, the first boss fight was absolutely fantastic and had some extremely clever attack patterns.
Quetzal was a really fun platformer to play, and much like other high-intensity platformers (be that pixel-perfect, or timing-heavy) it was hard to turn away from it even when I wasn’t progressing quite as smoothly as I’d hoped.
Quetzal is in development for Windows and Mac. If you’re interested, there’s a demo available on Steam.
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