Eryi's Action

I have a soft spot for small Japanese doujin games that nobody at a major outlet bothers covering, and Eryi's Action is exactly that kind of find: a brightly lit, cheerfully animated 2D platformer from solo developer Xtal Sword that is, beneath its pastel surface, a relentless trap machine built to confound and delight in equal measure. The premise is deliberately absurd. A fairy named Eryi wants her melon back. That is the whole story, delivered in roughly two sentences. What follows is twelve levels of the game systematically dismantling every platformer instinct you have ever developed. The genre label that fits best is "trapformer" - a close cousin of platform-hell games like I Wanna Be The Guy, though the emphasis here lands differently. Where IWBTG punished execution, Eryi's Action punishes assumption. Almost nothing behaves the way it looks. Chickens launch you skyward instead of dying underfoot. Ceiling spikes fall. End-of-level flags trigger Kaizo traps. The world map itself can kill you. Deaths are instant and infinite - your life counter drops into the negatives and keeps going, which is itself a joke. The core mechanics are simple: move, jump, pick up and throw objects or enemies to navigate obstacles and collect hidden diamonds. Boss fights punctuate the twelve stages with genuine variety, shifting into bullet-hell shooting sequences and a turn-based RPG parody segment where Eryi, a one-hit-point wonder, faces enemies with thousands of HP. An Ex Mode cuts your lives to thirty if the normal run feels too forgiving. What keeps this from being merely mean-spirited is the tone. The looping level music, sweet and slightly smug, restarts every time you die as if to say "shall we try that again?" The cartoony visuals, deliberately reminiscent of early Super Mario aesthetics, create a dissonance that makes each new trick genuinely funny rather than simply cruel. Much of the time, dying makes you laugh before you hit retry. That rhythm - die, laugh, learn, retry - is where the game lives, and it is a surprisingly cozy place to spend an hour or two at a sitting. I would not recommend playing for long sessions; the repetition of any single level's soundtrack, heard across forty failed attempts, starts to curdle. The honest criticisms are real, though. Eryi moves with a sluggishness that feels out of step with how reactive trap-focused platformers usually play, and her hitbox is larger than you will want. The soundtrack is slim, with only a handful of tracks. Veteran platform-hell players may find the difficulty curve too gentle in the normal mode, since most traps yield after two or three attempts rather than requiring the surgical precision of harder genre entries. The autosave system does not preserve checkpoints between sessions, so loading back into a level means re-earning every flag you had reached. These are not dealbreakers, but they are real friction points that the game never quite irons out. Steam players rate it Very Positive, and that feels accurate to me. This is a compact, self-aware piece of doujin craft that knows exactly what it is trying to do and mostly succeeds. It is not a long game, and it was never meant to be. If you find yourself smiling the third time a hidden block drops you into a pit, you are its audience.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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