Bean's Quest is a gorgeous 2D platformer with a twist! Emilio has been cursed and his girlfriend kidnapped! Transformed by dark magic into a jumping bean, Emilio must bounce his way to victory through 50 levels spread over 5 worlds. Can Emilio rescue his one true love and find his missing pet axolotls? Bean's Quest is for Windows, Linux, Linux64 and MacOS X!
Bean's Quest just nails it.
Either you go the easy way, just finishing the levels and having fun, enjoying a game that's quite easy, quirky and colorful or you go the hard way and try to perfect each stage, enjoying a game that's a real PITA, colorful and frustratingly, deliciously, excruciatingly devious. As you did with most REALLY good platformers.
The gameplay is simple enough to be picked up by kids in seconds (left arrow, right arrow) and it has everything the more demanding player could want: 3 objectives per stage (jewels, axolotl and moves par). It runs beautifully, is beautifully designed and drawn, the music is catchy. You CAN'T go wrong with this one if you're looking for not-quite-platforming fun. Plus it's cheap. Why are you reading this? Go play. Nao.
I try to avoid giving 10/10 reviews. As of this writing, this game in fact does have a few glaring technical issues, but the underlying game is just so perfect that I can easily forgive them.
Originally designed with the iPhone and iPad in mind (and currently no Android version, but hopefully this will be remedied and the APK will be made available on Desura), Bean's Quest uses a simplified control scheme where your character is constantly jumping, and you simply control left and right movement.
The music is great, the graphics are incredibly, vibrantly colorful, diverse, interesting, and full of life and animation. The level design is clever, there isn't a single level that seemed throwaway in the least, and new elements are introduced rather frequently. Despite it's roots as a iPhone game, and it's simple control scheme, this game gets challenging very quickly. Even after you've beaten the game, there are still hop pars to beat, as well as axolotls and gems to collect.
The indie community has brought us several amazing platformers over the years, and this little surprise, that seemingly came out of nowhere and just popped up on Desura, is the best new game I've found on Desura. The quality of it just blows me away, the whole thing, from the spritework to the music to the levels, is just consistently stunning, and I can't wait to see what these guys come up with next. The $5 price tag is more than fair, and they had the sense to make it multiplatform.
I know there's no demo (at the moment, anyway), but I assure you, there's no risk here. If you like platformers at all, Bean's Quest is among the cream of the crop. I can't think of a thing (aside from bug fixes) that would improve it. It's everything I could want out of a platformer. I've played countless thousands of games and this one now has the privilege of being amongst the highest echelon of that list. Perfect is a strong word, but at the very least, this is pretty damn close.
You don't want to miss this.
Very few games are so enjoyable from the get-go. Play this if you appreciate game-makers who pay attention to quality inside and out.
Ok, ultra-condensed review to fit the character limit.
First, problems:
1. Desura can't install the Linux version game due to server-side corruption. (However, manual install via tarball works)
2. People with non-widescreen screens (eg. my 1280x1024 LCD) must run windowed and manually pick a 16:9 resolution like 1280x720 or it'll crop rather than letterboxing.
3. While I recognize that some parts are meant to be pixellated, it's also obvious that some show scaling artifacts at the now-modest resolution of 1280x720. (For example, the text and character's outline in the title screen.)
Annoying, but not critical.
Gameplay:
I love the intro. It's cute, it's funny, it's basically the Mario story but that's unimportant.
I love the atmosphere. The music and and graphical design (with smiling clouds as moving platforms) make this the cheeriest game I've ever played. (Given the springboard design, probably takes influences from Sonic the Hedgehog.)
The title/menu screen music should run longer before it loops. It gets old too quickly.
The visuals have a bit of the overdone "smartphone-ness", but it's good enough to make everything ELSE feel like imitators.
I like puns and general silliness, so I like the villain stealing cute axolotls who say "thanxolotl!" when rescued.
The playable pseudo-level behind the level select is a nice little touch.
Having collectable gems lower resolution than everything else doesn't work. It's jarring. (Especially with the springboards for contrast.)
The controls are good but the difficulty curve on the collectables is a mess. (eg. Level 1 is fine, Level 2 and 3 are "try again from start" hell, then it gets easy again.)
All in all, fun but gives players a poor first impression. (The weird difficulty curve and things like the "can't try again without restarting" gem-collecting jump in Level 2 make it feel like a casual smartphone platformer as designed by someone whose only point of reference for difficulty is Super Meat Boy.)
A perfected platformer with responsive controls.
A game in which you play as a bean in a hat what more do you want?
Fun little game. Great to pick and play for a little while and come back to later. Great music and art.
A well done polished platformer reminiscent of the era of Amiga/16bit computer platform games.
Awesome platformer with stunning graphics and fun nonfrustyrating gameplay. Only the constant jumping by the character takes a moment to get used to.
Quite fun. I'm not good with games where every moves counts and time completion is recorded +hidden stuff all around the level. Got it this game during the giveaway (Thanks devs!).
And of all the things, why a jumping bean? I'm sure the evil wizard can do better. It was cute tough. :)