Sigi - A Fart for Melusina

I went in expecting very little - a silly name, a gimmick premise, and maybe ten minutes before I uninstalled. What I got instead was a genuinely well-crafted bite-sized side-scroller that reminded me why pixel games studio games from tiny one-person (or near-one-person) operations can still land with more charm than a AAA budget can buy. Sigi is a Ghosts 'n Goblins-flavoured 2D platformer spread across 20 brisk levels, and the moment the chiptune soundtrack by Saskrotch kicked in over those four-layer parallax backgrounds, I stopped being cynical. The mechanics are lean and intentional. Your knight hurls projectile weapons - swords, chicken drumsticks, and whatever else you scavenge from chests along the path - at a roster of zombies, bats, swooping birds, fast-charging skeletons, and screen-filling witches. Weapon pickups work Contra-style: grab a new one and it replaces what you have, which means there is a quiet strategy to deciding whether to swap mid-run. Each of the 20 levels also hides the four letters S-I-G-I to collect for extra lives, secret rooms crammed with loot, and food pickups that restore your three-heart health bar. A Super Mario World-style overworld map lets you replay any previously cleared stage, which matters because the boss encounters - one every five levels - spike in difficulty relative to the breezy standard stages. Farming lives before a boss fight is a legitimate and sensible tactic, and the game is honest enough to let you do it without friction. The screen-shake on every hit landing is the one technical annoyance that some players notice, especially when enemy density rises in later stages. Humour-wise, Sigi commits harder than the title suggests. Scrolling one-liner gags appear at the bottom of the screen during boss fights and random moments - absurdist little jokes that genuinely surprised me into laughing out loud more than once. The final boss pays off a running visual joke that I will not spoil, but it works. What the game does not fully commit to is difficulty. Seasoned platformer fans will breeze through the regular stages without ever seeing a Game Over screen, and the gap between normal-level ease and boss-level punishment feels a bit uneven. If you arrive expecting the white-knuckle tension of actual Ghosts 'n Goblins, adjust expectations downward considerably. The chiptune soundtrack is modest in scope - a handful of tracks that cycle by level setting - but it is precisely calibrated to mood. The boss battle theme in particular hits with more energy than you expect. Visually the pixel work is clean and bright, with day-to-night transitions giving a sense of variety that the relatively small number of background templates cannot quite provide on their own. It sits comfortably in the cheerful end of the retro-platformer spectrum, closer to early Nintendo than to grim arcade brutalism. For achievement hunters and speedrunners, the 100% completion target - which requires collecting every letter, every secret, and clearing the game in under 30 minutes - adds a meaningful second layer that casual players can safely ignore. Steam's 86% positive rating from players who bought it at its micro price is the honest summary: this is a game that knows exactly what it is, runs for about an hour, and does not waste a minute of that time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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