Broccoli Bob

I went in expecting almost nothing, which is probably the only way to approach a game like Broccoli Bob without coming away bitter. What you get is a side-scrolling 2D platformer that asks you to move through 15 levels across Summer, Winter, and Night-themed maps, collecting three captive broccoli characters per stage before finding the exit door. That structure, collect-then-escape, is about as stripped back as the genre allows. There is no hidden depth behind it. It is precisely what it looks like from the thumbnail. The enemy roster gives you beetles, goblins, scorpions, ice giants, and a few others, each with their own movement patterns rather than a single recycled lurch. That is a small grace note. The level design slots in scattered weapons you can pick up and use against those enemies, plus traps that will end a run if you are not paying attention. The combination of platforming traversal, collect-the-thing objectives, and trap-avoidance is what earns the puzzle label in the genre tags. It is light puzzle work, closer to spatial awareness than logic problems, but it is there. Honesty compels me to say that the craft here sits firmly at the lower end of the indie spectrum. The Steam reviews land around two-thirds positive from a small pool, which tells you the game functions and delivers its stated premise without catastrophic bugs, but that it does not leave most players with much to say afterward. Average reported completion time sits under 90 minutes. There is no narrative weight, no ambient score worth lingering on, no pixel artistry that makes you stop and look. For someone who normally champions the small, handmade, quietly magical game, Broccoli Bob offers very little to hold onto on those dimensions. Where it does not embarrass itself is in being a functional, clean, family-friendly platformer that a young child could sit with comfortably. The three broccoli collectible types per level, an Angry one, a Scared one, and an Indifferent one, give each stage a tiny scavenger-hunt quality that younger players tend to respond to. The partial controller support noted in the features list is a practical bonus for couch play with a kid. If that is the use case you have in mind, the short runtime stops being a weakness and starts being a reasonable session length. For anyone else, the game is a curiosity rather than a destination. It is the kind of release that finds its audience through bundles and deep sales rather than on its own merits as a standalone purchase. Without a stronger visual identity, a memorable soundscape, or puzzles with real bite, there is not much here for the seasoned platformer player to return to once the credits roll, if credits roll at all. Go in with that calibration set correctly and you will not feel wronged.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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