Toby: The Secret Mine Review

Toby: The Secret Mine may look an awful lot like Limbo, but sometimes requires Super Meat Boy style reactions and accuracy that doesn’t always suit it.

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Leaves you in Limbo?

Toby: The Secret Mine looks an awful lot like a Limbo clone. Is it just another artsy, colour-contrasting platformer or is there something else to it?

Story:

Like Limbo, there’s no narrative, and the game relies upon you to interpret what you see with your own eyes to help expand the story. Seemingly deliberately, the game reveals very little other than some bigger, taller characters that look rather like you (but with red rather than blue eyes) are out kidnapping your mates, and you reckon it’s a good idea to go rescue them, despite the elements, the crazy health and safety hazards in the local mine and the various traps that the big evil Tobys are leaving for you.

Gameplay:

Where the game does definitely diverge from its clearest sense of inspiration, is around the style of the platforming. Limbo relied on physics and creative solutions to puzzles for the most part, whilst Toby is more timing based.

The first few levels are relatively sedate, but by the half-way point, you’ll need some really perfect timing in order to progress. Thankfully checkpoints are plentiful, with the exception of the final level, where a single mistake will have you sent back to the start of the level, which is really frustrating. The difficulty level frankly ramps up a bit too much, with the last couple of levels only really serving to push out the play time.

A perfect run of the game (which would in fairness need exceptional skill) is probably under an hour, whilst even my mediocre platforming skills required under five hours to play through all the levels. There’s not much reason to go back either, beyond an achievement for rescuing all of Toby’s friends.

Generally, despite the increasingly extreme difficulty, the controls are at least, precise, accurate and responsive, with the platforming feeling pretty good. My only annoyance is that there are some physics based puzzles and traps which occasionally seem to fall over a little bit – which do leave you cursing the game rather than your lack of skill.

Presentation:

Limbo is certainly an influence for this side-scrolling platformer, but it’s no shameless rip-off. There’s a couple of levels where the muted colour palette is almost completely reversed, and there’s also quite a lot more colour in the backgrounds to change up the atmosphere.

The art style is decent, and the music, whilst fairly repetitive, sets up the action and does a good job of informing you when the game takes on a change of pace. My only frustration is the way the game deals with hit boxes and how you need to control the animation. Toby has, well, a big head. But his head actually seems invincible – it’s just his legs you need to worry about, but as they sometimes trail a bit behind the head, it can be difficult to judge timings.

 

Conclusion:

Toby: The Secret Mine” has much more of an identity than the art style would suggest. The level of challenge in the first half of the game makes it a relatively interesting proposition, but the level of timing and skill required in the latter half doesn’t really suit the game, whilst the difficulty curve also increases seemingly exponentially. And with the 21 levels taking about 3-4 hours at most to get through (even with 300+ deaths!) it’s not the longest game in the world. If this was a Games with Gold title, I don’t think anyone could feel upset, but as it stands Toby struggles to rise above the stream of quality indie titles being released at the moment. Solid but unspectacular.

Good

  • Art Style
  • Level Design

Bad

  • Short
  • Gets extremely tough
7.8

Good

Story - 7
Graphics - 9
Sound - 8
Gameplay - 7.5
Value - 7.5
Editor - Reviewer GamerKnights

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