Janosik 2
Secrets, sheep, and sauerkraut.
Janosik, which I played last year, was a free platformer that the developer, who I assumed was Slovakian but is apparently actually Polish, made as a hobby project. That game got enough positive feedback to encourage him to roll up his sleeves, find a publisher, and work on a more fleshed out and expansive sequel.
Like the first game, Janosik 2 revolves around the Slovakian folk hero Juro [or Juraj] Janosik, [I’m not bothering with the accent marks] who is a sort of Robin Hood figure, based on a real highwayman and exaggerated through legend. The gameplay and engine are all familiar too - you roll through traps, double jump across falling platforms, and attack guards and spiders with your sword and pistol. The screens are full of glittering coins, secret passages that reveal treasure chests and health refills, and switches or keys to open the way forward. Well, it’s familiar until the end of the first stage.
After getting captured in a hilariously abrupt cutscene, Janosik is dumped in prison, with nothing but his ability to roll and double jump to his name, and has to navigate a lengthy stage to unlock a second playable character, the werewolf Bogdan. Throughout the game, you eventually acquire a total of four characters that you can freely swap between, all of whom have their own weapons, upgrades, and special abilities. Bogdan, for example, has the innate strength to push certain blocks around, opening passages, blocking projectiles, or creating a platform for you to reach higher ground. With that skill, the two can then leave the prison and enter a hub map, full of numbered doors that lead to each of the main story stages - all 23 of them. Well, technically more, since every stage except the first and last technically have an entrance and an exit, with the exit door back to the hub letting you open a shortcut for quick access and backtracking, plus the entrance door to the next stage.
As you make your way through the story stages, you unlock more features of the hub level - a shop that sells more upgrades as you encounter fishermen in other stages, a blacksmith run by your cousin who can enhance characters’ equipment in exchange for runes, the witch from the first game returning to offer more optional abilities, and more. Most of your upgrades require you to find and access secret doors in the story stages, leading to special stages that are usually shorter and more focused on a single type of challenge, and reward you with heart containers, items to turn in to NPCs at the hub, and of course even more loot to collect.
The story maps are often sprawling, complex mazes, alleviated somewhat by the fact that you can usually unlock the map near the starting point, and the screen is pretty zoomed out. Death is common, but rarely a major setback, as there are plenty of checkpoints scattered around too, and the game is extremely fast paced anyway. It’s refreshing playing a snappy, open ended platformer like this, and each secret found and branch cleared brought a smile to my face. There’s a good amount of enemy variety, and none are notably annoying or oppressive. You generally have the freedom to play as whichever character you feel like using at the moment, and they all have their own strengths even in normal platforming and combat. Janka, Janosik’s girlfriend, takes the longest to receive an actual damaging attack, for example, but does have the unique ability to freeze enemies with a spell, making them easy prey to any other character, or even using them as a temporary platform. Combined with her unique and very long-distance air dash, she’s often the fastest at moving through levels even if she isn’t capable of killing any enemies.
The game has a lot of slightly awkward charm, best embodied by the cutscenes, which are extremely short animations reminiscent of old Flash games, full of exaggerated expressions, brief shots of motion, goofy noises instead of voice acting, and a lot of humor. All of the characters chime in when talking to NPCs, and there are a lot of silly jokes in the dialogue. The sound effects are of extremely varied quality and, frustratingly, volume - some of the shit later on like lightning attacks play at like three times the volume of anything else in the game, and are not pleasant on the ears anyway. That’s a shame, because most of the other quirks the game embraces do a good job of emulating classic early-PC platformers like Commander Keen and the Apogee games. I guess awful sound effects aren’t inauthentic but it’s probably the least enjoyable part of the experience.
The boss fights are even more varied than they were in the first game, and there are of course a lot more of them. None are as frustratingly brutal as the first boss of Janosik 1, and most of them have more going on than just attacking a bigger-than-normal enemy. Some have a bit of stage design in their arena to let you hide from attacks or position yourself for rapid fire hits, and a few even have more interesting gimmicks, like a golem you can tackle head on to whittle away at with normal attacks or loop through the level around it to find switches to drop it into the lava below.
If anything, the bosses are a bit easy, or rather, the game in general is, and that’s mostly down to how many healing potions you can find and carry now. In the first game, I found myself hesitating to use any potions after being forced to resort to them to beat the first boss. In Janosik 2, I finished the final boss while still sitting on over 60, on top of having a much expanded arsenal and max health compared to the first game. There’s even a fallback where if you somehow manage to spend all of your potions, the witch back at the hub will give you a couple for free.
There are three endings - one for ending the game without challenging the final boss, a second for killing her and then leaving, and the last for also finding and freeing all 150 captives across all the game’s levels. Thankfully, freeing everyone isn’t a particularly onerous task, since they are shown on the map of a level once you find it, and you can freely backtrack to any level you’ve previously visited, even going in the exit door instead if that puts you closer to where you need to go. You can also spend some time backtracking as a break from progress at any time - some of the game’s upgrades, especially early on, act somewhat like metroidvania ability unlocks, and give you access to new paths in earlier levels. At the end of the game, you can finally unlock a compass, which also gives you a treasure counter for each level and marks all gold on your map, in case you’re struggling to buy the last few upgrades or just really want to collect every single coin across the entire game.
At release the game had quite a few major bugs, including one that drained my gold deep into the negatives. Luckily there’s more than enough extra gold to find to offset what I’d lost, and the bug has apparently been fixed, but it was still frustrating. Janka’s ice spell also didn’t work properly when I first got it, and was patched shortly afterwards. There are a few other irritations with controls, balance, and level design, but they’re minor enough to not be worth nitpicking.
Janosik 2 is a massive achievement, taking everything that was good about the original game and expanding it in just about every conceivable direction without fundamentally changing it. It’s equal parts nostalgic and fresh, and is well worth its base price. Who knows, maybe if enough people buy it, we’ll get a Janosik 3!