Decline's Drops

My instinct with small solo-dev platformers is usually to lower expectations before the first stage loads. Decline's Drops punished that instinct almost immediately. Globule, a wooden puppet in oversized boxing gloves, moves through six fully hand-drawn worlds with a fluency that took me genuinely off guard: the combat is modeled on platform-fighter fundamentals, meaning you get normal attacks, tilts, smash attacks, specials gated by a linseed-point resource, a parry, and - yes - a wave dash that Melee players will recognize inside about ten minutes. That breadth of expression is sitting in a singleplayer platformer that most people will scroll past on a Steam browse page, and that still feels a little absurd to me. The structure is classic and unashamed about it: five stages per world, each capped with a boss head from the villainous Eternal Corp, then a challenge stage that test-drives everything the world just taught you. Drops collected in combat feed into Serge's shop, a genetically modified monkey merchant who sells phials that shift the difficulty dial in both directions. The double-life phial smooths out the harder stretches for players new to the genre. The double-drops-but-double-damage phial is essentially a self-imposed hard mode with a nice resource bonus attached. Each world also hides optional paths, heart fragment collectibles, and password-locked chests that ask you to punch them in specific directional sequences - a clever little mechanic that occasionally misfires when input registration gets finicky, which is the game's most consistent criticism across reviewers. Where Decline's Drops earns real affection is in the craft that sits underneath the gameplay. Every frame of animation is hand-drawn, and the pastel palette manages to feel simultaneously cheerful and melancholic - a mood the six worlds reinforce through their environmental storytelling. Each world is a low-key satire of something real: environmental collapse, corporate pollution, animal exploitation, consumerism. The game never stops to lecture; it just builds the atmosphere and lets you punch through it. The soundtrack, composed by ModalModule with sound design from Pixel Audio (whose credits include Spiritfall and Jotun), lands somewhere between whimsical and quietly sad, and the first-world tracks are the weakest of the bunch, so if the audio feels thin early on, give it time to open up. The friction points are real but bounded. Movement under pressure can feel slippery, particularly during precision platforming sequences that ask you to bounce between platforms without losing momentum. The combo meter, which ranks your unbroken attack chains, does not aggregate across a level or display a persistent summary, so skilled players who want their mastery acknowledged may feel underrewarded. Enemy variety is serviceable rather than surprising. None of these are dealbreakers, and post-launch updates have already added Boss Rush and Time Attack modes, plus a second playable character, Que Sera, introduced in a later content patch. A game this small still receiving that kind of care after release is worth noting. For platformer fans who grew up with Yoshi's Island or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze and wish someone would bolt Smash Bros. combat onto that chassis, Decline's Drops is precisely the game that should have had a bigger launch. It runs six to eight hours on a first clear, longer if you chase secrets or push into challenge stages, and it knows exactly when it is done. That clarity of scope, from a single studio, in a genre that rarely gives you both good-feeling combat and interesting level design at the same time, is the whole case for it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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