Downwell

A Podcast Review of Downwell: This week we cover the 2015 precision platformer Downwell and add it to the tier list. Don't make the mistake Danny made and start playing the story-driven adventure game 'Deepwell', you'll end up as confused as he was.

On this episode we talk about the developer "Moppin" and how Downwell spawned out of his 'game a week' project. Moppin was obsessed with Spelunky and Downwell came from him wondering what a mobile phone game with similar gameplay would be. We definitely did not see the Spelunky inspiration at first but as we talked through it more we started getting it - the core gameplay is fundamentally different but there's some overlap in item sensibilities and the "always be playing mentality".

We've found on this show that we really love these arcade-style games and Downwell is one of the greats of that. You can hop in and immediately be in the action trying to maintain your combo. For how ultimately simple it is we didn't find the UI to be particularly intuitive and the game didn't connect until we started really understanding the combo system, but once it did it was an absolute joy to play. Danny runs some simulations to try to figure out when to take the "apple" item in a run and we marvel at how much fun we had for a game that cost $3.