Penny’s Big Breakaway

My first hour with Penny's Big Breakaway felt like finding an unreleased Dreamcast disc wedged behind a second-hand shelf. Evening Star, the small studio formed by the Sonic Mania developers, has built something that smells unmistakably of 1999: chunky polygonal characters, flat shading, a bubblegum world called Macaroon, and a momentum system that rewards you for barely touching the ground. The premise is delightfully low-stakes. Penny is a street performer whose newly sentient yo-yo humiliates Emperor Eddie at an audition, and now she is sprinting through eleven worlds of themed levels while an ever-respawning army of penguins tries to grab hold of her. Stop moving and you lose. Keep moving and you feel like a genius. The yo-yo is the whole game, and it earns that responsibility. Using the right stick, you can fire it in any direction to attack, swing across gaps in mid-air, dash by flicking it twice in quick succession, or hold the button to turn it into a stationary pivot point for Penny to orbit. Hit the trigger and ride it along the ground to maintain speed. The combo meter on the right of the screen rewards keeping your feet off the floor, channeling something close to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in spirit, that obsessive hunt for a clean run that clicks together into pure flow. There are also treat power-ups that temporarily let Yo-Yo spin like a helicopter for airborne shortcuts or smash through brick walls, and each level hides three giant collectibles plus three timed citizen side-quests that give completionists genuine reasons to revisit. Time Attack mode with online leaderboards seals the deal for anyone who wants to measure their mastery against the world. Here is where honesty matters, though. The right stick does double duty as both yo-yo aim and the only way to nudge the fixed camera slightly, which means you genuinely have no real camera control. Evening Star built levels to compensate for this, and most of the time the framing holds up well. But there will be moments, especially during fast diagonal swings, where the perspective misreads the gap below you. The control scheme has a real learning curve that does not resolve in the first world. A handful of players bounced off before it clicked. Stick to somewhere around the fourth level of the opening world and the movement language stops feeling arbitrary and starts feeling like a dialect you have learned. The boss fights, by near-universal consensus from reviewers and players alike, are the weakest seam. They pull Penny out of the momentum flow the stages cultivate so carefully, and sparse checkpointing means some of their repetitive sections sting twice. The second boss in particular is a recurring topic of frustration. What lifts the whole thing well above those friction points is the artistry underneath. The soundtrack, composed by Sonic Mania alumni Tee Lopes and Sean Bialo, lands with the kind of quiet confidence that makes you forget to check the time. Each zone in Macaroon, from the pastel streets of Vanillatown to the lava-court corridors of Lawberry, has its own sonic and visual personality. The post-polygon aesthetic is not nostalgia bait, it is a considered style choice that gives every character and environment a specific warmth. A first playthrough runs roughly six hours, which is exactly the right length for this kind of kinetic experience. The game does not overstay its welcome, and it respects that its best hours are the ones you spend replaying stages to shave seconds and push scores higher. On PC and Steam Deck specifically, performance is clean and largely problem-free. Penny's Big Breakaway is the kind of debut that makes you wish the studio had more resources, not because the game feels unfinished, but because the foundation is so clearly good that you want to see what they do with twice the room. It is not a safe game, and it is not for every platformer fan. But for anyone who genuinely loves the feeling of momentum-based movement clicking into place, it delivers something rare: a new character and a new world that feel like they have always existed, just waiting to be found.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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