Electronic Super Joy

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that announces its entire personality in its title screen, and Electronic Super Joy does exactly that. The premise is gloriously absurd: a wanderer sets off on a revenge quest after a villain steals their butt. That is the story. It commits to the bit completely, and the off-color humor threaded through foul-mouthed character dialogue and surreal boss encounters keeps the whole ride feeling alive rather than hollow. Mechanically, this is lean and intentional. You run, you jump, you double-jump, and you smash downward in a ground-pound that doubles as both attack and precision landing tool. That last move changes everything once the level design starts demanding it. Stages introduce low gravity, world rotation, homing missiles, and autoscrolling sections that push you from the left side at an unforgiving pace. The core three-action vocabulary stays constant, but the environments around it never stop inventing new ways to use it. Boss fights are their own thing entirely, with one memorable stretch casting you into a shoot-'em-up showdown that arrives as a genuine surprise. The checkpoints are generous enough that failure rarely sends you back far, and the respawn is near-instant, which matters a great deal when you are dying dozens of times per stage. The audiovisual side is where the handcraft really shows. Silhouetted figures move against vivid, flashing backgrounds synced to a thumping electronic soundtrack composed by EnV. The music does not just accompany the action, it motivates it. When difficulty spikes, the tracks seem to build alongside the tension, and there is a real trance-like quality that pulls you through deaths that would otherwise feel punishing. The visual design is minimal by necessity but never lazy: bold color palettes, clean platform silhouettes, and background patterns that shift world by world. Fair warning, though: the strobing visuals are intense, and anyone sensitive to flashing lights should approach carefully. The game itself surfaces a seizure warning on startup. The one genuine divisor in the sound design is the adult-themed moaning that plays on checkpoint and death. It fits the game's raucous personality, but it is an immediate deal-breaker for anyone in shared living spaces or with low tolerance for that flavor of humor. The good news is it can be toggled off in the options without losing anything else. Hit detection has also drawn occasional criticism across versions, with some moments where a death feels like it landed a pixel outside the visible hazard. These are not frequent enough to derail the experience, but they surface during the harder later stages when precision is everything. This is a short game made longer by its difficulty, which is an honest trade. The main campaign across three worlds with end-of-world boss fights will not take a veteran platformer many hours of clean play, but clean play is not what you will get. Post-launch updates folded in a fourth secret world, bonus levels, and the Groove City expansion content. For the price of entry, the density is real.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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