A Hole New World

A Hole New World is a classically-styled action platformer from MadGearGames that wears its NES-era influences without apology. You are the Potion Master, the city is under siege by monsters spilling out of the Upside Down World, and the game hands you a weapon and essentially says: figure it out. There are no tutorials. There is no Easy Mode. If that sentence made you close the tab, this probably is not your game. If it made you lean forward slightly, keep reading. The core loop is combat-focused side-scrolling action with a meaningful item system built around potions. The Potion Master is not just a flavor title. Your toolkit of brews shapes how you engage with enemy patterns, and learning which potion handles which threat is the real curriculum the game teaches through repetition and death rather than tooltip boxes. The enemy variety pulled from the Upside Down World concept gives the designers room to get genuinely weird with creature design, and the better moments here come when a new enemy type completely invalidates the rhythm you thought you had mastered. That is classic action-platformer design logic done right. Where the game shows its smaller-studio seams is in pacing and overall length. The experience is short by modern standards, and some players will hit the credits feeling like the difficulty curve spiked in places that felt arbitrary rather than intentional. Mixed Steam reviews at 76 percent positive reflect a real split: people who grew up on Castlevania-adjacent difficulty find a lot to like, while players expecting some acknowledgment of modern quality-of-life conventions bounce off the opener hard. The pixel art is genuinely handsome throughout, with the Upside Down World visual language giving enemy and environment design a nicely unsettling contrast against the brighter overworld sections. The soundtrack leans into that same retro-sinister register and is one of the quieter strengths of the package. For what it is, A Hole New World is an earnest, focused piece of work. MadGearGames clearly built this for people who already have a vocabulary for this genre, and that specificity is both its charm and its limitation. It will not win over newcomers to hard-action platformers, and it does not try to. Whether the difficulty reads as authentic tribute or unnecessary friction depends almost entirely on your patience threshold and your relationship with games that demand you pay attention before they give anything back. If you are the kind of player who replays sections until enemy patterns are muscle memory, there is real satisfaction in here waiting for you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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