New Super Lucky's Tale

My first honest reaction to New Super Lucky's Tale was relief. After a run of games that demand spreadsheets, skill trees, and twenty hours of lore reading before anything fun happens, here is a platformer that just lets you run around colorful worlds jumping on things. That sounds dismissive. It is not. Playful Corp built this as a ground-up reimagining of their earlier, rougher Super Lucky's Tale, fixing the two things that sank the original: a bad camera and sluggish controls. Both problems are genuinely solved here. The camera is fully rotatable and largely stays out of the way, and Lucky himself feels immediately responsive. He has a double jump, a tail swipe, a ground pound, and a burrow move that lets him dive under the dirt and pop back up through the floor. That burrowing mechanic is the game's signature trick, and the levels actually build clever challenges around it rather than treating it as a gimmick. You will not unlock new abilities as you progress, the moveset is fixed from the start, but the game rotates its level types fast enough that the same tools keep feeling fresh. One world has you running auto-runner-style gauntlets through obstacle corridors. The next drops you into a 2D side-scroller. Then there are sliding block puzzles in the hub worlds, marble-rolling bonus stages, stealth sections, and fetch quests woven into the 3D open areas. The variety is deliberate and it mostly works, though the marble-rolling stages earned near-universal criticism and are genuinely the low point. The structure owes obvious debts to Banjo-Kazooie and Spyro: hub worlds connected by portals, pages of the Book of Ages standing in for jigsaw pieces, L-U-C-K-Y letter sets scattered through levels. If you grew up with those games, the DNA is immediately familiar. That familiarity is both the appeal and the ceiling. The game is not trying to push the genre forward; it is trying to execute the classics with modern polish, and on those terms it succeeds more than it stumbles. The art is bright and readable, the enemies are cartoon-charming, and the villain faction the Kitty Litter (Jinx the sorcerer cat and his mischievous kids) has enough personality to keep the thin story moving. The biggest honest criticism is difficulty. Genre veterans are going to glide through this. Hearts are plentiful, falling off a ledge costs health rather than an instant life, and the post-game Foxington challenge stages are the only place the game meaningfully tests your skill. That design choice is intentional: this is clearly built for younger players and adults who want a palate cleanser, not a hardcore collectathon. If you go in expecting Celeste or A Hat in Time's later levels, you will be bored. If you want something that runs at a clean 60fps on PC, controls beautifully, and does not overstay its welcome across a six-to-seven hour runtime, the value proposition is solid. Completionists hunting achievements will get more mileage chasing coins, costumes, and every hidden page.

Alex · Scout Team

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