From the Archives: BZZZT
How am I even supposed to say this title?
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
I played the demo for BZZZT a few years ago, and was pleasantly surprised. It looks like a pretty generic spike-dodger platformer game, which is a genre I’m not a big fan of, but everything about that demo really clicked with me. It felt good, it was fun, and had a surprising level of polish. If it had come out relatively soon afterwards, I’d probably have picked it up right away, but I had all but forgotten about it by last year, when it finally came out.
BZZZT is a pretty straightforward platformer - you jump and dash through cycling hazards and make your way to the exit of the stage, optionally collecting floating golden bolts along the way. After you clear a stage, you are awarded with a trophy for collecting all the bolts or beating the par time, or a bigger trophy for doing both in one run. Taking a hit or falling down a pit results in an instant death [at least on normal] and you respawn right at the start of the stage for another go. The stages themselves aren’t terribly long, and the challenge level is fairly stable, but there are no checkpoints within levels, so you really do have to finish them fairly.
It’s harder to praise a good platformer on a mechanical level than it would be to pick apart a bad one, so I’ll just leave it at this - the controls are tight, the obstacles are fun, and the game has an almost perfect flow that makes a complete run extremely satisfying. Unlike the usual ‘masocore’ examples, BZZZT never feels like it’s pulling a mean trick on you just to trip you up or waste your time. It’s extremely rare to get to a spot in a stage where you seem to be forced to wait a cycle out, and I never found myself unsure of how to proceed.
The game also looks very nice - obstacles, enemies, and interactive elements are all readable, the colors, lines, and effects have a good amount of pop, and despite largely being about platforming in cyber tunnels, there’s a lot more visual diversity than you might expect. You even get to go outside and go swimming in a few stages.
But the real glue holding BZZZT together is the music. They did a lot right, and again, it’s more difficult to explain why it’s good than it would be to shit on a bad or boring soundtrack. One of the biggest perks is that the music continues seamlessly through your deaths and restarts, and even rolls over into each new stage, smoothly transitioning to new tracks as you enter the stage they start on. There’s a totally new track every few stages, so you never get forced to listen to any one thing for too long, and none of them are horrible or irritating. In fact, I really like a few of them.
A recent update added a few extra side areas, hidden behind gently indicated secret walls, which give you an optional challenge to clear and a collectable chip as a reward. These aren’t a huge difficulty spike, but they do give you a reason to revisit a few stages even if you aren’t chasing a 100% trophy, and a few of them even toss up some new gimmicks or gameplay changes. The game also has a handful of secrets that can just be used to bypass or shortcut some stages, usually at the cost of ramping up the difficulty by spawning a few extra enemies, which is clever.
There’s one big problem with BZZZT, and that’s simply that it’s short. Very short. I beat the game on normal with little difficulty in a bit over an hour, and revisited about half the stages to collect all the bolts and secret chips almost quickly enough to refund the game. That’s not a lot of game, even for an extremely highly polished indie title, and the main issue with that is that there isn’t any compelling reason to devote a lot more energy to it. As far as I can tell, nothing is locked behind getting a perfect clear on every single stage or finishing the game on Insane, which just limits you to 7 total deaths in a run and deletes the file on your seventh death. Now, I want to be clear, I’m not actually going to refund the game, and I probably will play it again, just to blast through the stages bumping the music - it’s not really a terrible value in any way. I just feel like a little bit more gatekeeping would give the game some more legs. I wouldn’t mind being forced to sit up a little straighter, sweat a bit more, even if it’s just for a token congratulations at the end.
BZZZT is a tight package, doing a great job at avoiding all the things that generally piss me off about the genre. It’s just a bit light on the content for its full price - so it’s a good thing it’s currently on sale, under the roughly ten dollar high water mark I’d recommend it at. Maybe someday I’ll make an honest attempt at clearing Insane, but I still wish there was some internal reason to do so.
Afterward
Later in the year, the developer added a Very Easy difficulty option as well as a further set of unlockable bonus stages, 24 in total, which are locked behind certain thresholds of Perfect stage trophies. You don’t need to fully 100% the game to unlock everything, but it does plenty to incentivize you to do more than just plow through the story stages once, and at this point I’d consider the amount of content and challenge required to see it all thoroughly satisfying. And the music is still good enough I have it on rotation in my own personal playlist.
If I re-ranked the 2024 games today I think BZZZT would go a bit higher than it did - 13th overall.
BZZZT can be purchased on Steam, GOG, and Nintendo Switch.