Past meets present: Gimmick! 2
Gimmick was not only re-released in 2023 after decades of obscurity, but the series was revived in 2024 for a quality sequel, too.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Sunsoft had quite the run as a developer and publisher in the 80s and 90s, but not all of their best titles made their way out of Japan. Gimmick! did, but only sort of: it released in Japan for the Famicom in 1992, and in Scandinavia — and only Scandinavia — for the NES the next year, where it was known as Mr. Gimmick. This, despite there being a North American office for Sunsoft that was supposed to handle this sort of thing in the first place: they chose not to, for a number of reasons including how it looked (adorable and quirky and weird) and the emphasis being placed on games for the NES’ 16-bit successor, the SNES, as well as the Sega Genesis. (Sunsoft of America made a bit of a habit of this sort of thing, too: there were eight games from Sunsoft on the PC Engine in Japan, and not one of them made it to the Turbografx-16 in North America despite that also being a 16-bit system. They loved a sure bet.)
What this meant is that, for three decades, everyone outside of Japan (and Scandinavia) missed out on Gimmick! unless they decided to emulate it, which required even knowing that it existed and was worth checking out in the first place. While some other obscure Sunsoft titles like Ufouria: The Saga ended up on Virtual Console decades after release, Gimmick! continued to languish in obscurity and unavailability, making it a candidate for people like me to say, “hey, re-release this one.”
This changed in 2023, with a remaster of Gimmick! launching on the Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Windows in July of 2023. That remaster was handled by Bitwave Games, which, about a year later, announced something even more surprising than a re-release of Gimmick: a sequel. That would hit digital shelves in September, published by Clear River Games, and while it’s significantly different from the original in a number of ways, it does understand the spirit of Gimmick!, and succeeds as a sequel because of it. How much it succeeds might be a matter of personal taste, but a more approachable version of Gimmick! that adapts the gameplay to the expectations of 2024 while retaining plenty of challenge and the kind of mastering of physics that made the original so fun? That’s a dub in my book.
Gone are the items from the original Gimmick!, which could heal its protagonist, the adorable yokai known as Yumetaro, as well as allow for some abilities and power-ups to assist you in your platforming adventure. Gone, too, is some of the freedom that the original game often exhibited: Gimmick! 2 is a less “open” experience, with a little less wiggle room for how you approach any given moment within it, but much of that change is due to the overall structure being modified from one game to the next. Whereas each screen of Gimmick! came with challenges to overcome, Gimmick! 2 is setup so that each screen is its own challenge or series of challenges, much more reliant on figuring out the “correct” answer or answers in order to proceed. In some ways, it’s a subtle difference, but it’s also going to be what makes or breaks the game for you if you were a fan of the original.
This is not to say that Gimmick! 2 has done away with the kind of open-ended manipulation of physics and strategy that allowed the original to flourish. There are multiple ways to solve many of the game’s puzzles and platforming challenges, and it’s loaded with secret rooms and treasures that you’ll have to discover if you want to secure the game’s true, more satisfying ending. (You might think you’re fine ignoring some treasure, until it turns out that defeating the kidnapper of the little girl you were hanging out with doesn’t bring her back all on its own.) The best way I can describe it is that enjoyment of the original Gimmick! came from a high-level understanding of its systems and physics and what could be done with them. You could complete Gimmick! without being very good at any of this, which could make the game feel a little… pointless? Fickle? Confusing? Strangely lifeless and abrupt? Gimmick! was anything but, however. It was alive with possibility in every moment, and if you figured out how to ride Yumetaro’s star around to reach otherwise unreachable places, defeat difficult enemies, or effectively dance circles around bosses who would otherwise cause you a headache, then you understood the game and felt the joy it was capable of producing. It was a rush.
Gimmick! 2 raises the baseline skill necessary to progress, while lowering the ceiling of possibility a bit, too. You won’t complete Gimmick! 2 and come away thinking you aren’t any good at it: you have to be good at it to even complete it in an incomplete fashion, as it’s constantly asking a lot of you in terms of strategy and timing and, hand-drawn animation aside, what are very much pixel-perfect jumps. But if you were a high-level Gimmick! player, you might notice that things are a bit more rigid here, even if there is still some clear freedom of choice for how to go about things. The trade-off is that there is also much more Gimmick here to play: whereas the original could have easily been an arcade game sucking up your quarters instead of a console one (and was actually initially revived in arcades in 2020 before the home remaster), Gimmick! 2 is going to take you 5-6 hours to get through even on an incomplete run where you didn’t figure out how to get all of the hidden treasures, or even find where they were hiding. There’s a lot more game here, and while some of the openness might be gone, the challenge is not. It just comes in a different form, and it ratchets up and up.
Gimmick! 2 has kind of a Celeste thing going on, in terms of single- and multi-screen challenges where you kind of have to do things right, in motion, through a combination of strategy and fast-reaction timing. And, like Celeste, you will fail often, but be immediately revived to try again. It’s an evolution of the kind of platformer that emerged from titles like Super Meat Boy, except Gimmick! 2 isn’t full of cheap deaths caused by not being able to see what was next, in terms of enemies or pits full of spikes or what have you. Gimmick! 2 wants you to take in the whole of a screen, and see what’s to be seen, then devise a strategy. Then, it wants you to implement it: you just might not successfully do so on the first or second or 10th try, depending. The game is broken up into worlds, and within those worlds are levels, and those levels further break down into what is a series of single-screen or multi-screen platforming challenges, broken up by checkpoints. It might seem like there are a whole lot of checkpoints early on, but as you get deeper into the game and it starts to ask more of you, you’ll understand why they’re so prevalent. One positive for this, outside of saving your progress, is that it opens you up to constant experimentation. Try that goofy idea! It just might work. Or you might impale yourself on spikes and immediately die. If so, hey. Checkpoint.
In order to successfully devise and implement a strategy for a given challenge, you need to understand Gimmick! 2’s physics. For one, there’s no run button: you must create all of the momentum for jumps and running yourself by heading downhill, or launching yourself off of your star, the riding of which is a trick to figure out all its own, given you have to catch it on the rebound after it’s bounced off an obstacle. You have to understand where this star is going to go after you charge it and throw it — where it will go based on what it’s going to hit, where it will go depending on your height when you release it, whether you throw it from a standing position or jumping forward in the air, or as you fly down from a high above platform. You need to use the star to hit switches, to insert it into star-shaped symbols in order to create platforms that will only exist as long as the star is inserted — meaning that, should you need to use the star again while you’re on one of those platforms, you’re going to have to do without or topple below. It’s the only way you have of defeating enemies, some of which need to be struck multiple times, and since it doesn’t fire off in a straight line — it’s always bouncing until it comes to a stop — even the act of defeating a basic enemy is something that requires thought.
Which can sometimes make it feel like Gimmick! 2 has some rough edges, but no. Any rough edges are rough on purpose, and also the point. Bitwave might have designed a different version of Gimmick! than what the world had before, but it’s also clear they understood the spirit of what made the original game work, and implemented a modernized, different version of it here in the present.
This is also why, despite the game being much more designed to feel like “if X seems like the obvious solution, then X is what you want to do,” than the original, it’s still not quite that cut and dry. Getting the secrets will require going off script basically all the time after some early telegraphing. A deeper grasp of the game’s physics will start to reveal that X only looks like the optimal strategy, but in fact you should do Y if you want to really nail this challenge, or make your way to something that seems unreachable with X as you play. Opportunities for riffing are there if you have the sight and ability to take advantage of them: it’s just that you can still get a ton of enjoyment out of Gimmick! 2 even if you don’t excel at it to that level.
While I was a little put off by the early trailers from a visual perspective — you might have seen them described as befitting a mobile game instead of something that has a native Playstation 5 release — it’s all very adorable and well-animated in action when you’re not watching a compressed YouTube trailer through some social media site’s also terrible video service. It’s not the most beautiful side-scrolling platformer you’re ever going to play, no, and the backgrounds do bounce back-and-forth between highly detailed and kind of… off, in the same way that, say, New Super Mario Bros. games could look off, but there are a lot of lovely little details in the various characters, their expressions, their animations, and everything has a welcome brightness and cheerfulness to it, even when it’s meant to be a gloomier setting. That, combined with a quality soundtrack from David Wise (formerly of Rare, one of the many composers from the Donkey Kong Country series, including its Returns re-launch) makes it a complete package.
Gimmick! 2 might not satisfy everyone who enjoyed the original, given the changes it did make to the formula. However, it’s a worthy follow-up that at least understood what made that game work, and translated that into the present-day challenge platformer style with success. It’s a more approachable game than the original, one that should pull in new fans, and is also the kind of game where it’s easy to get sucked in for one more try. The kind of game that compels you to find all of those hidden secrets and treasures, to squeeze out the full experience on offer — it’s hard to call a game like that anything but a success. Hopefully, this one doesn’t take as long as the original did to find its audience. Since it’s released on multiple platforms this time — Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series S|X, Steam — and somewhere besides just Scandinavia, that shouldn’t be too much of an ask.
A review copy was provided by Clear River Games, and played on Steam Deck.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.