RISKY CHRONICLES and the curse of destiny

My first hour with Risky Chronicles felt like finding a dusty VHS tape of a game you half-remember from a cousin's house in 1994 - the cover art promises more than the cartridge delivers. Consulog's tribute to 90s arcade platformers like Rick Dangerous has genuine heart behind it: a globe-trotting explorer named Risky, a fedora, a gun, and ten levels spanning ancient pyramids, Aztec temples, an underwater shooting section, a haunted house, a prehistoric cave, and even a pair of 3D motorbike segments that break up the side-scrolling rhythm. The ambition to mix genres is visible and, in moments, genuinely endearing. What works, and it's worth saying clearly, is the soundtrack. The platform levels carry a synthwave pulse that keeps your feet tapping even when your thumbs are suffering. The cartoon visual style is warm and each biome has its own colour personality. When you fall into a flow on a well-constructed platform section, running and shooting snakes, vultures, and pterodactyls while dodging spinning buzzsaws and falling rocks, the game briefly becomes the thing it's trying to be. Boss encounters at the end of each level add a punctuation mark that feels earned. The difficulty knobs are also thoughtfully exposed: you can set your starting lives at 3, 6, or 9, remap controls freely, and activate checkpoints that hold your progress when you lose a life mid-level. The problems, though, are hard to overlook. The character cannot fire while jumping or crouching, and attempting to shoot from a crouch snaps Risky upright automatically - which turns some routine enemy encounters into cheap deaths. The hitboxes on hazards like sawblades read as significantly larger than their sprites imply, and the collision detection inconsistency is the most-cited frustration across every review the game has received. Ladder climbing is slow to the point of feeling like a punishment for using vertical space. The 3D motorbike levels, a genuinely creative twist on paper, are so forgiving that most players will clear them on a first attempt. The result is a game with wildly uneven difficulty: certain 2D sections are punishingly unfair, while the genre-switching moments barely register as challenges. The generous scatter of extra lives throughout levels feels less like design generosity and more like the developer acknowledging that the hit detection needed compensating for. For whom does this work? Specifically: anyone who grew up with Rick Dangerous or the SNES Indiana Jones tie-ins and wants a short, undemanding nostalgia trip measured in evenings rather than weeks. The game runs around two to four hours depending on how mercilessly the hitboxes treat you, and there is minimal replay value beyond a completion run. No achievements, no unlockables discussed anywhere in the community, no branching paths. What you see is what you get, which is a small, hand-assembled platformer from a two-game French indie studio that clearly loves the era it is imitating, even if the craft is not yet there to fully honour it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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