Penne For Your Thoughts

Today we’re checking out an indie title I picked up – if you can call it “picking up” since I downloaded it – anyways it’s called Freddy Spaghetti. I share a special kinship with this game’s title because one of my nicknames growing up was Eddy Spaghetti. See, my torment by assholes started at an early age and people thought giving me awful names like that, along with such original names like Eddie Munster, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Eddie and the Cruisers, and of course Mr. Ed were totally hilarious. They very rarely used Eddie Van Halen or Eddie Vedder, since I would’ve actually preferred those, but people don’t like doing what I like or prefer. Joke’s on them though because most of those people that I’ve been able to find are dead now.

Just kidding! I just wanted to shock you. Did it work?

Anyways, Freddy Spaghetti is a physics based game along the lines of Octodad, Human Fall Flat and stuff like that, with controls that are weird at best, and at worst they’re intentionally clunky and difficult for the entertainment of anybody watching. I’m going to make a lot of comparisons to Octodad since it’s easily the most like that one. If you don’t like Octodad, I think that makes you species-ist against mollusks or something and you’re probably cancelled now. Sorry to be the one to break it to you. You had a good run though, I’m sure.

Freddy is a piece of pasta – not the character on Parks & Rec – and the game uses rope physics to move him. So if you’ve played Octodad, you’ll remember how you would have to move each tentacle individually to get him going, and Freddy’s movement here is similar. It’s not always 100% responsive or even consistent when you need him to haul ass away from something, but most of the time it’s solid. Also there’s a neat little jump move you can make him do and the platforming segments that utilize that were pretty imaginative.

The game has a story that starts pretty simple and gets increasingly insane. It’s basically from 2 perspectives – one being Freddy whom you control, and the other being the narrator, who’s doing his best Stephen Fry impersonation in hopes of landing the next Little Big Planet game. The game starts with Freddy being created by Dr. P Starr, also the name of the developer of the game, and he goes on various adventures. Some good, and some that get him into a lot of trouble. There’s time travel, there’s him rampaging down city streets, there’s even him getting into a computer program and causing trouble there. The story really moves at a breakneck speed and doesn’t really dwell on any one setting for very long, and I thought it was pretty original. I personally didn’t like some of the turns it took, but then different strokes for different folks.

Some levels have you doing nothing but walking from one end of the level to the other while you listen to the narration, or maybe it’ll have Freddy rage out in anger and you’ll have to do something unusual like break a bunch of china on the dinner table.

The art style is colorful and pretty cute. It’s intentionally low budget so even though the story is better than The Last Of Us 2, don’t expect it to have better graphics. Like there’s a wild west set of levels where some of the NPCs don’t even move or blink or anything. At first I thought it was lazy but looking back it was pretty funny and added to the game’s charm. If that wasn’t intentional, then, well, it worked anyway.

Where this game starts to differ from Octodad is in the skill needed to get through the game. The levels are very fast and some will take you under 30 seconds, where I think the longest it took me to get through one was around 2 to 2 1/2 minutes. Not counting some bonus levels, there’s 50 in total and I hope you like the bloop bloop noise from getting achievments, because you’ll unlock one for every level you beat. When you compare the levels here to Octodad which takes a more deliberate and casual pace, the differences stick out a lot more. Octodad took kind of a puzzle-game approach in making the player use the physics and some clues to complete goals, whereas Freddy Spaghetti wants you to master the weird physics to the best of your ability to survive and make it to the exit of each level.

The difficulty varies and that’s mainly due to the physics itself. Some levels have you doing nothing but walking from one end of the level to the other while you listen to the narration, or maybe it’ll have Freddy rage out in anger and you’ll have to do something unusual like break a bunch of china on the dinner table. Which by the way is hilarious to see. Other levels have you crossing traffic or vaulting across platforms in the sky, or outrunning police.

Remembering which button moves which end of Freddy is critical, and thankfully those ends are color coded for you to tell them apart easier. A big gripe I have, however, is that starting in the last section of the game, the colors are changed up and it felt like I was learning the game all over again. I don’t know why that was necessary but I cussed this game more than a few times after that. If you want to throw a new challenge at a player, go for it. But this wasn’t a challenge nearly as much as it felt like a trick. Like “oh, you got use to the controls, now I’ve remapped them so it’ll make the game harder!” Gee, thanks.

One last complaint I have is that one of the bonus levels has him playing jingle bells on the piano. The notes are wrong. Not the piano notes he wiggles onto, because I can’t play piano and don’t care about that. But the song itself is not correct. How the hell do you mess up Jingle Bells? Like I get that he’s a piece of pasta and his brainpower is only slightly larger than the average Kotaku or Polygon editor, but for my own sanity, why couldn’t it be correct? You had to record the piano keys getting pressed – just hit the correct ones!

Sooooo at the end of the day, Freddy Spaghetti has a lot of charm going for it with an original and weird story that’ll keep you interested enough to play all the way through. The controls are mostly functional but like most of these physics based games, having to actually skillfully make it through some of these levels with controls like this will be really frustrating at times. The game’s currently $5 on consoles so if you feel like dropping that on a game you’ll probably knock out in a couple hours, then go for it. Worst case it’ll just make you want to go play through Octodad again. Or I guess worst case it could kill you. Wow, I’m in a dark mood today.